These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News.
Our newscast is supported by Pacifica Radio, community radio affiliate stations, and listener
supporters.
We podcast at www.fsrn.org.
That's F-S-R-N dot O-R-G.
You can email us your feedback, questions, and story ideas to comments at F-S-R-N dot
O-R-G.
From KPFA in Berkeley, I'm Anitra Grisales.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI, where the time is just about 7 o'clock.
Actually, it's 7.01.
Time for another exciting edition of Off The Hook.
It's good fun when you know.
Off The Hook.
And very good fun when you know.
And a very good evening to everybody.
I figured we'd let the theme play all the way through this time for once.
Emmanuel here with Off The Hook, joined tonight by Mike.
Hello.
And over on, well, not really on the other side of the room is not Kevin.
Hello.
Welcome.
You haven't been with us for a while.
Last week.
Don't you have class now?
I did.
Did you quit?
No.
No, not in a sense.
The teacher kind of quit.
He is on the other side of the room.
It's just a very small room.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
We're in a different studio tonight.
And also, I should bring in Bernie S. from Philadelphia.
Are you there?
Yes, I am here from Philadelphia.
Okay, great.
So, everything works, which is a good thing.
But, yeah, we needed to give up the other studio because of a pressing need for another programmer,
which is not a problem.
But we just have to sort of find the new buttons and figure out where everything is and where everything is not.
I've already messed one thing up.
Jones, if you're listening to this, I didn't record the first minute of the show.
What will we do?
I don't know.
We have to patch it together.
In fact, if you listen to the archives, you're probably going to notice a difference with the show up until this point where I mentioned that
or where I started talking shortly before that.
But we are recording it now.
How are our levels?
Levels look good.
Levels look good, yeah.
Let me hit the mic.
Yeah, they seem fine.
Okay, we're not too amateurish tonight.
And also I should point out that we just found out while we are in, in fact, delay, we're in delay,
we don't have access to the delay button.
So that means that we can't take phone calls because if something bad were to happen,
the only way for us to save ourselves from a $325,000 fine from the FCC would be to run through three different studios
to get to the button in the main studio.
That's just the way it is right now.
So we are in delay, but we have no control over it.
Does that make any sense?
To me, maybe.
I'm not sure about our audience.
I'm thoroughly confused.
Okay.
Well, that's good, I guess.
Bernie, how are you doing down there?
Good.
It's tough living in a censored society.
It really is.
You know, I mean, I know our listeners can handle things that go out of the air by accident,
which does happen occasionally, but it shouldn't be that big a deal.
But it is, unfortunately, and we have to take it very seriously.
Anyway, let's launch into various topics for tonight.
First one being a late-breaking story, which is kind of disturbing, I guess.
A man has been killed when his phone exploded.
I feel like the National Enquirer here.
Haven't we done this one already?
No, this is a new one.
This happened in Seoul, South Korea.
An exploding mobile phone battery apparently killed a South Korean man in the first such known case
in this gadget-obsessed country, according to the Associated Press.
Gadget-obsessed.
The man, identified only by his family name, which there's no point in us even saying,
was found dead at his workplace in a quarry Wednesday morning,
and his mobile phone battery was melted in his shirt pocket.
Yeah, we presume that the cell phone battery exploded, the police official said,
only on the condition that we never find out who he is, who the police official was.
The police are being anonymous now?
Yeah, isn't that something, that the police are being anonymous?
What do they care? It's not like they did anything wrong, as far as we know.
Maybe they're not supposed to talk to the press.
Unless it was not really a cell phone at all, but some sort of bugging device.
Well, the phone was made by South Korea's LG Electronics,
LG, of course, standing for Life's Good, not in this case, though.
It's the world's fifth biggest handset maker.
LG Electronics confirmed its product was involved in the accident,
but said such a battery explosion and death was virtually impossible.
Virtually is not good enough, apparently, for this guy.
I guess.
A person with only one known name.
We're not going to say on the air.
Manuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Typically, this happens with the third-party aftermarket cell phone batteries,
the ones not made by the cell phone manufacturer.
These are like off-brand rechargeable batteries
that are typically made with substandard chemical formulations and so forth,
which make them more likely to have bad chemical reactions inside,
and then the pressure builds up and they explode.
In previous cases where exploding cell phone batteries were analyzed,
they were found not to be the original equipment manufacturer batteries,
but like third-party knockoffs.
So if you're worried about this, make sure that the battery in your phone
is not a counterfeit battery.
A lot of times they have a hologram on them that says Motorola
or whatever manufacturer the phone is
to indicate that it's a genuine OEM battery
and not some third-party knockoff that is more likely to explode.
It seems like kind of a scare tactic to get people to only buy approved products.
It might explode and kill you otherwise.
These stories could be planted by the cell phone companies,
cell phone manufacturers, to get people to buy the batteries,
but I don't know if that's too plausible.
Are you suggesting that this one named person, individual,
whose name we're not reading over the air, actually does not really exist,
and perhaps even the police official who claims,
who demands anonymity also may not even exist?
Well, we don't seem to have a lot of hard facts on this.
Well, we know the guy worked in a quarry,
so that sort of narrows it down a little bit.
Yeah, okay.
I don't know why they'd include that detail.
It does remind me of this kind of interesting paper I read this week
about de-anonymization of datasets.
So our listeners might know that Netflix had this competition
to see who could improve their recommendations algorithm,
and what they did was they released 500,000 movie ratings,
and they didn't say who rated them,
but they said user ID number 17 rated this movie a four and that movie a three.
And what's interesting is that this paper was able to figure out
who a lot of these users were using other publicly accessible data.
So maybe we could figure out who this guy is as well.
How were they able to figure out who the people were
just based on what movies they liked?
They're very talented. It's a very thorough paper.
It turns out that you only need about six movie ratings
to uniquely identify a person.
So if you can match those six with six movies that they rated on IMDb
or some other public source,
then you can get all the other movie ratings that they might not want public.
If you take six ratings, that is so unique.
What's the scale? One to 10? One to 100?
One to five.
One to five?
One to five.
All right. So I rate six movies, was it?
Ten movies? How many?
Six.
Six movies. Okay. I give one a two, one a four, one a five.
You're saying that just that combination, that six-digit number, if you will,
that is unique enough to make me stand out.
It appears to be, yeah.
Wow.
There are some movies almost everyone can agree are really terrible
and some that are really good.
Well, it turns out that most people have seen at least some unusual movies.
Obviously the big movies that millions and billions of people have seen,
a lot of people have seen those and most people have some opinion on them.
But if you look at the movies out of, say, the top 1,000,
it's pretty unusual exactly which of those movies each individual has seen
and what they thought about them.
And this goes to show how easy it is to be tracked without realizing
that you are being tracked.
It's something simple.
As innocuous as just saying on a scale of one to five whether you like a movie,
having six of those.
Well, first of all, what were they cross-referencing it to?
Netflix has all this information publicly available?
Who says what about what movie?
No. Netflix released this anonymized data set
and they were able to compare it to people's public IMDb ratings,
ratings on IMDb.
And they're assuming that the ratings are the same.
Well, it turns out that there's some fudge factor,
that if it's not all exactly the same,
you can still pick the closest match and almost certainly be right.
And, I mean, it's interesting because it raises other questions
of how to anonymize data because Netflix, I think, honestly,
didn't intend to tell anyone individual users' preferences.
They said, all right, we'll take the names out and that will be fine.
But it turns out not to be fine.
So it has interesting implications for other large data sets.
Well, interesting you should bring that up because an interesting story
came out this week concerning a device known as TiVo,
which many of us use.
NBCUniversal has become the first major TV broadcaster
to strike a deal with TiVo for the right to use their TV viewership research
and interactive advertising products.
Now, that agreement was announced earlier this week.
It reflects rising demand in the TV industry
for detailed audience viewing information.
I'm not sure why there's a rising demand
for detailed audience viewing information.
I guess they just want it more than ever now.
Information is power.
I guess, but wasn't it always power?
I don't know.
NBC wants more and more power.
They want their power to rise.
They need their information to rise.
Well, okay.
Anyway, TiVo is a provider of digital video recorders.
About a year ago, they started offering advertisers
second-by-second ratings of programs and commercials
based on the viewing habits of its subscribers
as well as other services.
Second-by-second ratings.
Now, earlier this month,
they added demographic data about the viewers themselves
such as age, income, marital status, and ethnicity.
First of all, I'm curious.
How are they getting this information?
I have two TiVos, and neither one of them has asked me anything
about my ethnicity or my age or my income or anything like that.
Well, they could easily know.
How would they know?
I'm assuming it's based off the information
you registered with TiVo with.
Well, that's not real information either.
Whoops.
It's not required by law that I tell TiVo the truth, is it?
Is it?
I mean, maybe you lie.
I mean, it's another thing.
Like, maybe you actually are unidentifiable
in this particular data set.
I've been told that many times.
But most people probably tell the truth
when they're asked these questions.
And if TiVo were particularly evil,
they could correlate the address
with other publicly accessible sources of information
and know even more about you.
Mike, that's the thing.
Everyone tells the truth when they're asked these questions.
Why?
Why do you all tell the truth?
When companies ask you your name and age and address,
why do you tell them the truth?
Why do you give all this information out
and make it so easy for them to track you?
That's what I don't understand.
And people go and they do it on Facebook
and on MySpace and on LiveJournal.
They give all their private information out,
their real name, their real address, their real city,
their real likes and dislikes,
and the people they like and dislike,
and all these intimate thoughts that, you know,
in years past, you would keep locked up
in a desk drawer somewhere.
So I just don't get it.
It seems like, yeah,
privacy is more and more endangered today.
But it seems like we're also giving more and more of it away
voluntarily.
Well, I went to a talk once called Privacy is Dead.
And did you get over it?
I tried.
All right, continuing with this story then.
With its research,
TiVo is competing with industry giant Nielsen Media Research,
which also offers commercial ratings and demographic data.
Advertisers, media buyers, and TV networks
have made many of their ad deals this year
based on Nielsen ratings of TV commercials.
You know, if I was a Nielsen person,
I would never give a commercial a good rating at all
because I hate commercials.
I really do.
So I don't know why people would give positive ratings
to those kind of things.
Companies like NBCUniversal
are looking for additional products from sources
such as TiVo,
which can tap its set-top boxes
to get data about the viewing patterns of its subscribers.
Advertisers have been asking us
to help them find new ways
to make TV advertising more effective.
This partnership gives us the data,
the research,
and the tools to try a bunch of new advertising formats
and test their performance.
NBCUniversal will also use the agreement
to sell advertisers TiVo products
such as interactive tags,
which means that...
This is great.
The tag means a company's name can still be seen
even if the viewer is zapping through an ad.
So viewers can also click on the tag for more information.
It'll be just like having one of those awful websites
where the pop-up boxes show up.
And another TiVo service
allows viewers watching promotions
of NBCUniversal shows
to click on the promotion
and immediately record the show.
Actually, that's not such a bad thing
because that's something that sometimes you want to do.
And this is all starting on January 1st.
I know, Mike, you have some questions
or some concerns about privacy here,
about being tracked.
They say it's anonymous.
TiVo says that they're not evil
and that this information,
this tracking information,
does not correlate to someone's name,
although it seems to not correlate
to ethnicity and age and income.
Well, if you are in a town
with, you know, few people of your race
and TiVo says that most people of your race
like a certain program,
it becomes very easy to correlate it to you.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff like that.
And furthermore, like,
I can conceive of no way
that this could benefit anyone
except the advertisers.
I mean, our friend, Junce, disagrees.
He wrote to us that
if his preferences help to shape
the future of television programming,
then he's all for it.
But I'm not convinced that this data
will somehow lead to an increase
in television programming quality.
I think it will just lead to somehow
them charging more for advertisements.
Well, I mean, do you think that
if you ask the majority of people
in this country
what the best TV programs are on the air,
do you think you'll get a better answer
or a worse answer
than what people are assuming
are the better programs on TV today?
You know, I have faith in people,
but I don't have that much faith
in the American public as a whole
as far as taste goes.
I think we just wind up
with a whole bunch of reality shows
and infomercials.
Well, they're very cheap to produce,
and apparently people watch them religiously
that advertisers know that it's a good buy.
Mm-hmm.
Well, what are some ways
we can mess with their heads
and give bad information out
and make it so that this kind of study
is kind of worthless?
I don't think there's enough of us.
Like, I think, you know,
if 10% of the TV views in public
somehow manages to provide bad data,
then the other 90% is still valuable data.
Mm-hmm.
So I don't know.
They can't tell the difference
between a bad 10 and a good 90.
It doesn't matter.
You know, if you have data that's 90% good,
you have data that's 90% good.
Hey, Manuel.
Yes, Bernie.
This is sort of a paradigm shift
compared to the old rating systems
like Nielsen and so forth used to use
where one family or one person
who was viewing or listening habits
really counted for, like, 10,000 people
in the population.
So I got a call from Nielsen Research once
for their...
Actually, no, it was Arbitron,
for their radio station survey.
I got a call from Arbitron
about 15 years ago,
maybe even a little...
Yeah, about 15 years ago.
And I delighted in telling them
that when they asked me what radio stations
I listened to,
I delighted in telling them
that I enjoyed listening to Radio Havana, Cuba
and Radio Moscow.
Oh, boy.
I also said the BBC and Radio Doja Bella
and things like that,
but I don't know whether that was
just discarded as bad data,
but I'd like to think that skewed the result somehow.
I think it also resulted in the Patriot Act.
Thanks, Bernie.
Oh, well.
Okay, well, that's...
It's all propaganda.
There are ways.
Yeah, there are ways to mess with them
and give out slightly wrong names.
Like, for instance, if you fill out...
If you have to fill out a form of any sort,
you don't have to spell your name exactly right.
Spell it a little bit off
or add a different middle initial
or something like that
or put sweet number whatever
at the end of your address.
All of that will help you see
who's sending your name to whom
and who you can trust
and who you can't trust.
Sometimes their data entry people do that for you.
Uh-huh.
Spell your name wrong.
Oh, that's true as well.
That is definitely true.
But particularly if you're entering it yourself
online or something,
then there is no data entry person.
Speaking of TiVo,
TiVo is now finally coming to Canada.
That's right.
Canada now is going to be getting TiVo.
I believe it's not going to be quite the same
as in the States,
but this is the first time.
They have digital recorders
for the various cable and satellite companies
up there,
but TiVo's move into Canada
represents a natural important progression
for our business as we continue
to make sustained progress
across international markets.
You can guess who said that.
That was one of the spokespeople for TiVo
saying that.
All right, so exciting news,
and I'm sure Canadians will now be happy
to have their viewing habits tracked perhaps.
Sold to the CBC, maybe.
Maybe, yes.
Okay, Mike, you found this story,
which I thought was very interesting,
about some charities
that were having difficulty with their ISPs
and how hackers are the ones
who are getting blamed
for their email addresses and passwords
being bandied about.
Do you have any more details on this?
Yeah, apparently thousands of donors
to 92 charities
that use online database software
and services from Convio Incorporated.
These email addresses and passwords
got taken by people
who weren't supposed to have them.
Convio is one of these big companies
that provides online services
to non-profits.
There's a number of them,
and I've always found them
to be kind of sleazy
whenever I've met them in the past.
You meet them in alleys or something?
No, I meet them in conferences
where they're trying to give me things
in order to buy their very expensive services.
Okay, it's expensive,
but it's geared towards non-profits.
Why would non-profits go to something
A, sleazy, and B, expensive?
Well, a lot of non-profits
don't have in-house technical staff
who can implement it
in a more cost-effective way.
And if they go to something
that's not geared towards non-profits,
it's even more expensive?
Well, there's certain needs
that non-profits have in common.
The need for donor tracking and stuff like that
is a sort of niche
that a lot of companies like to fill,
or some companies fill.
Yes, Bernie?
Mike, I had a question.
Does this company,
do they generally charge like a...
How do they charge these non-profits?
Is it like a cut of the proceeds
that they collect from the donors?
Or is it just a flat rate or a combination?
I mean, I don't know
this particular company's pricing model,
but in general it can be any of those.
If they're doing online donation processing,
then they'd probably take a cut.
If they're just tracking,
it could be by the size of the database
or a flat monthly fee
or whatever they can get away with.
What were some of the non-profits
that were using this company?
I think the Red Cross was one of those, wasn't it?
I don't know about the Red Cross,
but CARE, the large charity,
the American Museum of Natural History,
was part of it.
FreePress.net was one of them.
So what exactly happened?
The 62 non-profit groups,
they say that information about their donors
might have been compromised.
In what way?
Were they just out there on the web or something,
on a website?
Was that information even given out?
I mean, it's not clear.
Even in this article,
this article is in the Times,
and the first paragraph it says 92 charities
and the fourth paragraph it says 62,
so I don't even know
how many people are affected by this,
but apparently they got the usernames and passwords,
and most people probably have the same password
on other services,
especially for these non-profits
that they may interact with only once a year.
So that someone could impersonate them
on another website,
and the article is careful to warn us
that there's no evidence that this data
has been used to breach anyone's privacy yet.
I mean, that evidence,
you wouldn't see that evidence,
not immediately anyway.
Individuals would see it,
and you'd have to contact
every single individual person
to find out if there was any evidence
that something weird happened to them.
But what I found interesting about the article,
which appeared in the New York Times on the 27th,
the very first word is hackers,
and the first sentence reads,
hackers obtained access last month
to the email addresses and passwords
of thousands of donors
to 92 charities that use online database software
and services from Convio Inc.
So right away, hackers,
they're the ones behind this.
It doesn't matter that there was no security
or somebody made a very bad mistake.
Hackers are the only people out there
that are interested in getting access
to this information.
Is that what you read out of this?
It's what it says.
I mean, it's pretty clear that hackers
are the first word of both the title
and the body of the article.
Well, it says hackers cracked charities'
addresses and passwords.
Is that how this allegedly took place?
It's what it says.
I mean, it's interesting because,
assuming that they got enough addresses,
there's 92 charities,
probably some are bigger than others,
but this is thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands of people.
If they steal money from a dozen
or a few dozen of them,
these people are never going to connect it
to the charity.
I mean, I don't know how many donors
the American Museum of Natural History has,
but it's got to be a lot.
Ah, interesting.
And most of them,
probably only occasional donors
who wouldn't think of it.
Well, the American Red Cross says
up to 278,000 email addresses
have been compromised.
I'm not even sure what that means.
How do you compromise an email address?
They got the password to email addresses
by donating to the Red Cross?
I have to assume it's the same password
to the actual email.
For instance, Gmail or Hotmail
or something like that.
But then it says,
passwords were also at risk
in 1,351 instances.
So they're differentiating email addresses
from passwords.
So how is an email address at risk
if you don't know the password?
This makes no sense to me at all.
Anyway, they say,
we're lucky this just involved email addresses
and a few passwords
and not any personal identification
or personal numbers.
So I guess what they mean,
if I can try and read into this,
what they mean is simply
by listing the email addresses of donors,
they consider that to be compromised.
So private information, I suppose,
getting out.
I imagine it'd be more
than just their email address.
Well, even, I mean,
even a lot of people might consider it
a loss of privacy
to know that they are affiliated
with these nonprofits.
I mean, depending on exactly which groups,
some people may not want their employers
to know who they give money to.
Or who's,
not even with money,
but who they are ideologically aligned with
to receive a newsletter.
So, you know.
I would just like to know how this was done.
I mean, what exactly are they saying?
Because obviously,
what would you need to crack
to get a list of people's email addresses
in a particular system?
It sounds like something
was just left lying around.
We've seen this countless times
where companies put databases
on their websites someplace
and someone just figures out the URL to it.
That's not really cracking into a system.
It's not really doing a hacker-type thing.
It's maybe being a little bit clever
in figuring something out.
But you certainly can't blame
the person who finds it.
It's the person who leaves it out there
for the whole world to see.
Yeah, I mean,
and if it were just one nonprofit,
you could assume that the, you know,
IT director of that nonprofit
or whoever had a bad password or something.
But the fact that there's 92 of them
seems to indicate that there's some flaw
in the software package.
Okay, well,
I guess that's the story
of lost data of the week,
which seems to happen
almost every time we're on the air.
Last week, it was England
with all those people,
millions of people
with all their information out there.
And now people donate to charities.
Nobody's safe.
It's another reason why
you should use fake information,
not when you're donating things.
Obviously, you want to really give money,
but you don't have to use
the same email address.
You don't have to use
the correct spelling of your name
or even an address
unless they need to mail you something.
In fact, sometimes it's better
to make a donation
and give them a fake address
so that they don't pester you forever
when you stop making donations.
I've had that happen a few times.
Okay.
In Ottawa,
they are calling for more surveillance cameras
or the police chief is anywhere.
I don't know how the rest of the city
feels about that.
But more surveillance cameras
should be keeping an eye
on citizens in Ottawa's downtown core,
says Chief Vern White.
He said this on Tuesday.
I'm not suggesting
that the police have a police-owned state
where we maintain security
and surveillance over our citizens.
I'm telling you that I believe
it would assist the police
in criminal investigations
and may assist citizens
who make complaints against police,
possibly.
It's so great
that they're looking out for us.
Well, they're just trying to fool us
into saying,
yeah, we need cameras
so that we can catch you guys
doing something bad.
You know, like the guy who got tasered.
I think we all saw the video
of the guy getting out of his car
and getting tasered
by the hysterical cop
for not doing something
exactly the way he wanted him to do it.
No, I can't say I saw that video.
It's been everywhere.
I saw the one where the,
in the college,
the kid getting tasered.
Oh, that too.
There's so many taser cases,
it's ridiculous.
But this one was a guy
who got pulled over by a cop
and you see him getting out of the car
and basically the cop
is yelling at him the whole time
and the guy just says,
what's the matter with you
and turns around
and walks back to his car
and at that point he gets,
he's shot in the back with a taser
and his wife jumps out of the passenger side
all hysterical
and he screams at her
to get back in the car
and apparently she was at risk
of being tasered too
for not following his commands.
Yeah, you know,
and it was all captured on camera,
the camera of the police car.
The police cars have little cameras
and apparently the cop
didn't get to this one
and erase it in time.
So this has been all over the place.
Well, it's interesting
we're talking about tasers in Canada
as I just happened to stumble upon
a fact of that 18 people were killed
last year in Canada with tasers.
Yeah, and I think between 150 and 300
over the past few years
in the United States.
So this is a big problem
and tasers are obviously being used
a whole lot
but that's not really
what the story is about.
It's just sort of a side show.
We talked about this last night
on Off the Wall.
But yeah, cameras I guess
can be good for uncovering
police misconduct
of which there certainly is quite a lot
as well as other things
but it's also something
you change the whole way
you live your life
when you realize
that you're always on camera
and I don't know how many of us
are we on camera now?
I don't see a camera in here
but look around.
Those of you listening now
are you on camera somehow?
You might think you're safe
but really there could be something outside
that can see you
or maybe you're driving
and there are cameras on the road
or maybe you're a babysitter
and the people that you're babysitting for
put a little camera in the lamp
or something.
Everyone's always,
we've got spy mania
where we're watching
each other constantly.
I don't know if I'm on camera right now
but I have a sneaking suspicion
my voice is being recorded.
That's hopefully true.
We'll see about that later.
But yeah, it's something
obviously they're trying to push
out here in New York City
more and more surveillance.
They want to build the ring of steel
here downtown
to hopefully make things safer.
I can't believe you said that
with a straight face.
The ring of steel
that they're going to build.
Well listen,
we say Freedom Tower now
without laughing.
Who says?
It seems really absurd.
Well I mean basically
they say things enough times.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
We say that
and we don't burst into laughter
every time we say it anymore
because it's become reality.
There are kids who are being born right now
who don't know what life was like
before such ridiculous things
as Patriot Act
and U.S. Department of Homeland Security
and Ring of Steel
and Freedom Tower.
These are words that will become ingrained
in our psyches
and we won't be able to shake it.
So yeah,
I'm not laughing
when I say this anymore.
I still laugh
every time I hear someone
order Freedom Fries.
I don't hear that very often.
I don't hang out
with those kind of people.
I think most people
who do that too
are joking maybe.
But anyway,
so they want to bring this
into Manhattan
like they have in London
where you can't take half a step
without being on a new camera
in London.
It's insane.
And apparently
that's what Bloomberg's idea
for New York is
to actually make New York
as much of a surveillance state
as London.
What I find odd about that,
if you look at the statistics
of violent crime
for this year,
actually for murders for this year,
do you know
how many people have been killed
in this city
by people they didn't already
have some kind of relationship with?
Just random violence
that involved death.
How many people?
Not a lot.
35.
35 for a city of
how many million people?
It's incredible.
Six million?
Eight million?
Yeah, something like that.
So I think that's safer
than just walking through a mall.
And I dare say
even if you put cameras everywhere,
it probably wouldn't have affected
such a low number.
And when I was in London,
when I was talking to people in London
and reading newspapers over there,
I was hearing reports
that yes, crimes weren't committed
in front of the cameras.
They moved their victim to the forest
and killed him there
when it wasn't on camera.
So it just is resulting
in spreading out of the crime
a little bit more.
But the cameras are still there.
You're still being recorded
for everything you do.
And keep in mind,
it's not just for violent crimes
or for illegal things.
It's for being in a neighborhood
you're not supposed to be in.
It's for hanging out with people
you're not supposed to be
hanging out with,
being associated with
a group of individuals.
And that can be used
against you at some point.
Maybe not today.
Maybe not tomorrow.
But at some point,
a government could come along
that could completely profile
all sorts of people
based on their interest
and their association.
So these are scary tools
we're putting in place.
And we should think twice about them.
That's my message to Ottawa.
Anyway, the cameras,
according to a criminal lawyer,
who I don't know why
he's in this story,
but criminal lawyer Mark Urtel
said that they reduce people's privacy
and civil liberties.
That's probably why
he's in the article
because they knew
he was going to say that.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
I'm not quite sure
what else he said
to merit being in this article here.
I think that's pretty much it.
But Carleton professor
Josh Greenberg,
who is conducting
a publicly funded study
of CCTV cameras,
closed circuit television,
said researchers
watching surveillance camera operators
consistently found
that they focus their cameras more
on some types of people
than others,
such as young black
or aboriginal men.
What a surprise.
I'm shocked.
The studies also found
that camera operators
often use their systems
to ogle women and girls
and compare their sexual attributes.
Ogle?
Yes.
What's ogle?
Ogle, you know,
I don't hang out
with many oglers or oglers,
so I don't really know
how to pronounce it.
I'm proud of that.
Anyway, many in the crowd.
What crowd?
Where'd the crowd come from?
Apparently a crowd gathered
once this story
started to be written.
Many in the crowd said
they didn't care
about privacy concerns
and the cameras
would make them feel safer.
And that, my friends,
that is it right there.
Those of you who don't care.
That's why this is happening.
People who don't care
and say, yeah, go ahead.
Put in more cameras.
I'll feel safer.
These people are beyond not caring.
They actively want the cameras.
They will feel safer with them
and they want to feel safer.
Mm-hmm.
But they're fooling themselves.
Well.
That's valuable.
One woman said
the streets of Ottawa downtown
are not like they were
in the 1950s.
There wasn't crack
and all the other stuff
that seriously affects
our downtown neighborhoods
and makes us feel unsafe.
How does a camera prevent crack?
I don't understand
how that's even possible.
Crack detecting cameras?
You can do crack
in your own home
away from the camera.
Yeah.
So I understand it.
Another woman
in the now unruly crowd
said cameras
made her feel less safe.
I'm not going to feel
more secure
than my daughters
and I are on tape.
I'm not going to feel
more secure
that my daughters
and I are on tape.
Where somebody is watching me
when I have no idea
what's being done
with the tape
that's being made.
I have no idea
about what could be done
in the future
in terms of creating a record
about my movements
in public space.
And that's something.
It's public space.
It's one thing
to have cameras
in office buildings
where it's private property
and they want to know
who's where.
But we're talking about
people walking down
public streets,
in parks,
things like that.
Years ago,
this would have created
a lot more outrage
than it's creating now
because of the fear factor.
Sad, isn't it?
Okay.
What else should we be afraid of?
Cell phone.
Cell phone tracking.
Federal officials
are routinely asking courts
to order cell phone companies
to furnish
real-time tracking data
so they can pinpoint
the whereabouts
of drug traffickers,
fugitives,
and other criminal suspects.
That's according to judges
and industry lawyers.
Wait, wait, wait.
Note to fugitives.
Turn your cell phone off.
Well,
is that even enough?
Just turning it off?
I think so.
Bernie?
Well,
it's not enough,
but it would be enough
if the federal officials
were routinely asking them,
maybe,
with at least
some probable cause
because in many of these cases,
judges have granted
these requests
without requiring
the government
to demonstrate
that there's any probable cause
to believe that a crime
is taking place.
It's really outrageous.
There should be
probable cause.
The cellular
telephone industry association,
the lobbying arm
for the cellular industry,
has said that
there's a lack
of consistent
legal standards
for tracking
a user's location
and that's made it difficult
for carriers
to comply
with these
law enforcement
agencies' demands.
The guy who represents
the CTIA
has said that
he's never seen
such a request
that was based
on probable cause.
Never.
Never seen a request
to track somebody
by cell phone
based on probable cause?
Yes.
Does that mean
that there aren't
very many guilty people
around or that
they just skip that step
all the time?
It means they're just
skipping that step
that should be required.
And that's again,
that's not even against
the Justice Department standards
that there should be
probable cause
and they're not doing it.
So let's just use
a hypothetical here.
Let's say that they're out there,
the federal government
wants to track one of us
and so they request
from a cell phone company
bits of information
that allow them to keep,
is it real-time monitoring
we're talking about?
It could be.
Okay.
It may or may not be.
Monitoring of one sort or another
of one of us in this room.
Okay.
So they do that.
They don't have to show
probable cause.
They get that information.
What happens after that?
The carrier then
provides that information.
It can be done in real time.
It depends.
There's different services
that the carriers provide.
And all of them
are really expensive.
It's like thousands of dollars
every time they do
one of these.
And it's like
hundreds of dollars
per ping.
Wait.
They charge the cops
to spy?
Oh.
Huge amounts of money.
A huge profit center
for the wireless carriers.
I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah.
Not just the wireless carriers
but the wireline carriers also.
Yeah, but you see,
if Andy Sipowicz
from NYPD Blue
wants to get into an apartment
where there's supposedly
some foul play going on
and he asks the landlord
to let him into the apartment,
the landlord doesn't say,
okay, that's going to be 10 bucks.
So at what point
does the cell phone company
get to say,
we're going to charge you
for this little bit of spying
that you want us to undertake?
It's just the way it's done.
It's been done that way
for decades
where the phone companies
just submit a bill.
And then there's actually
published rates for this stuff
that I've seen
for the various carriers.
And it's really expensive stuff
just to set it up
it's so much.
And then for every additional ping
it's so much.
So a typical tracking deal like this
could result in, you know,
could cost many thousands of dollars
which, you know,
guess whose pocket
that comes out of?
Well, it just seems to me
that a phone company,
a cellular phone company
could actually have an incentive,
a profit incentive here
of spying on its customers.
Maybe they could lower
the rate of phone calls
and make that really cheap
so people are using them
all the time
and then sell the service
of spying on those people
who are using the phones
all the time
to law enforcement
and that's where
they make their real profit.
Well, it also comes
out of our pockets
because there's thousands of dollars
that are charged
for every one of these,
every one of these
non-probable cause requests.
Of course, yeah.
It's all tax dollars
that comes out of our pockets.
And that's not even...
We're paying for our own spying.
Right, that's not even
for the customers
of the cell phone company.
That's just something...
We don't have a say in that, Bernie.
That's just what happens.
Yep.
Wow, it's genius.
Okay, but getting back
to my hypothetical.
Okay, so they go
and they watch us move around.
Let's say they watch
NotKevin move around
for a month or two,
track his movements,
see where he goes.
And I imagine they also
can see what he dials up
and what he accesses
on his phone as well.
That's a different request.
That's a different fee involved.
That's a different request.
Okay.
They can tell where you are
when you're like 30 feet,
wherever you go.
But then if they want
pen register data,
that's extra.
That costs extra
to get that information.
And neither request
are being submitted now
by law enforcement agencies
with probable cause,
with an affidavit
of probable cause.
They're using
some lower standard.
Okay, so basically
we're just watching
NotKevin move around
from his house
to his school
to wherever else
he feels like going.
Yes.
I thought probable cause
was just about
the lowest standard
out there.
I mean, it's basically
the cop saying,
yeah, I think he did it
and I have some reason.
It's not a high burden of proof.
And you're saying
they can't even meet that?
No.
What they're using
is they're citing
specific and articulable facts
showing reasonable grounds
to believe the data
are relevant
to an ongoing
criminal investigation,
which is different
than what's called
Rule 41
of the Federal Rules
of Criminal Procedure,
which contains
the probable cause standard,
which is a higher standard.
So this is like,
as you point out,
this is a really low standard.
Basically, they can just
pull this out of their ass.
Oops, forgot the delay.
Run down the hall, will you?
We've got six seconds to make it.
Okay.
Okay, so continuing, though,
with my hypothetical,
we're watching NotKevin,
or they're watching NotKevin
go all over the place
and do all kinds of
dull, boring things, supposedly,
nothing really incriminating,
for however long they feel like.
And then they decide,
you know what?
This is boring.
We don't want to watch this guy anymore.
Let's stop doing it.
Okay?
Yeah.
What happens after that?
Well, I'm sure
they don't throw that data away.
They store it
for future reference, maybe.
Does NotKevin ever get told
that they're watching him,
that they were watching him
for the last few months?
No.
Okay, so that's something
I'm kind of curious about.
There's no requirement
that the person
who is a subject
of the monitoring
be told about it?
Because way back
when my phone calls
were being pen-registered
by the FBI,
I got a little letter
from New York Telephone
saying, oh, by the way,
this has been going on
maybe a month or two ago.
It was after the fact,
but they did tell me
they were required to.
That was then.
This is now.
Say for some reason
I did find out
this was happening.
Would you have to file
a Freedom of Information Act
to obtain this data?
You could.
Whether you're going to get
an answer or not
is a whole other story.
Would NotKevin be legally allowed
to stop using his phone
and not be tracked,
or is that illegal now, too?
Actually, there are federal rules
that we'll call enhancements.
When they're sentencing somebody,
they can add points of enhancements
which increase your criminal score
so you get more sentence,
a longer sentence.
So if you evaded being tracked,
like thinking you could be followed
by your cell phone data,
if you stop using a cell phone,
the prosecutor could actually say,
and he used this,
there's all these rules they have.
One of them is
if you took evasive action,
and that would be
considered evasive action.
Wow.
What times,
what fantastic,
marvelous times we live in.
I just can't get used to it.
Okay, so, and the way to be safe,
the way to be safe,
is turning off your cell phone enough?
Is it still sending out a ping or something,
or do you have to take the battery out?
What's the wise thing to do
if you think you're being tracked?
Well, the absolute surest way
to ensure your phone is not being pinged
or tracked is to remove the battery.
I mean, if there are,
your phone could be hacked,
sometimes remotely,
by law enforcement agencies
through the cellular carriers
or PCS carriers,
to make it look like it's,
you know,
it's operating normally,
and it could actually be
transmitting audio from your phone
or whatever.
I mean, there's all kinds of things you can do
to be absolutely sure,
and when your phone is in your,
when your battery is in your phone
and you're not using it,
it's still communicating with a network
more or less constantly
and can be pinged very easily.
So, if you really want to be sure,
you can either take the battery out
or put it in,
you know what also works?
You can keep it in,
you can keep the battery in,
you can put it in a couple
of those anti-static bags.
I thought you were going to say tinfoil,
but okay.
Tinfoil will work too,
but those sort of silvery-looking bags
that they package circuit boards in,
if you ever bought a,
like an adapter card for your computer
and there was like this grayish envelope
that is sort of silvery,
you could put it,
and two layers of that
will attenuate the signal enough.
You can actually see the phone
through the transparent thing,
but it blocks the signal.
Of course, it won't receive any calls,
but you can still punch buttons
and like retrieve information from it.
Amazing.
Speaking of, go ahead, Mike.
I was just going to say,
you could use a cell phone jammer.
Yeah, I guess you could.
How about that?
Speaking of not Kevin's movements
over the last week
and why the authorities
might be interested in tracking him,
you went to the demonstration
to save the Hotel Pennsylvania.
Yes, I did.
I think you're the only person in the room
that made it over there
because it was the day after Thanksgiving
on Black Friday.
What was it like?
What happened?
It was actually a lot of fun.
I was expecting it to be very subtle,
but everyone there was very enthusiastic
and was just really getting into
handing out the flyers
and explaining the situation
to passersby.
We got a lot of compliments
from hotel workers
and even Amtrak workers
who seemed to be staying at the hotel.
Well, it is right across the street
from Penn Station,
so it's not that surprising.
The reaction from just regular people
coming up out of Penn Station
or walking down the street,
did they know about the hotel being in danger?
It seemed like most people
did not know about it,
but once we explained,
gave them the brief explanation
of what's going on,
they really got into it.
For those who don't know,
Hotel Pennsylvania is where we have
our conferences,
the HOPE conference
that takes place every couple of years.
In fact, the next one is going to be
in July of 2008.
They announced plans.
Vornado, the company that owns
that entire part of town apparently,
announced plans to tear down the hotel
and replace it with a huge office complex
that will look like
another version of Times Square,
according to the artist rendering
that we got a glimpse of.
What we've gotten involved in since then
is this campaign to just preserve the hotel
in any way possible
by landmarking it,
by just getting all kinds of public support,
by putting pressure on Merrill Lynch
not to abandon downtown
and go uptown and fill this new building.
The response has been simply unbelievable.
Community Board 5 voted for landmark status,
and the process just continues.
We have all sorts of people involved now.
There's a website,
www.savethehotel.org,
that has all sorts of information on it.
There's an online forum at talk.hope.net
that you can get involved in
and post all sorts of information,
ideas, feedback, that kind of thing.
We have an email address,
hotelat2600.com.
That's hotelat2600.com
for people to send any pictures
or correspondence, memories, stories,
opinions about the hotel
that we can then use and distribute
and send out to other people.
This is a movement
that's really starting to grow,
and not just in the New York area
because people from outside the New York area
are the ones who stay in a place like this.
They come to the Hope Conferences
or they come to other conferences,
and it's just a piece of history
that we're afraid might be lost,
and obviously, from our own perspective,
if we lose this piece of history,
we don't have a home
as far as the Hope Conferences go.
So it's good to see people get involved,
and I guess there'll be more demonstrations
in the future?
In fact, there will be.
Okay, so we'll be announcing that here
on this radio station
and at hope.net as well.
Okay, let's take a look
at some of the email that we get,
our email address.
God, I've been throwing a lot of URLs
and email addresses around
in the last two minutes,
but our email address,
oth at 2600.com,
for those people who want to write to Off The Hook
and give their feedback, opinions, whatever.
Send us hate mail.
We don't get enough.
Hate mail, yeah.
Hate mail is very important to us.
It gets us through the day,
and lately, everybody's been friendly,
and what kind of world is that?
I mean, don't get me wrong.
We appreciate the friendly people, too,
but we could use some hate mail.
Yeah, friendly people are fine,
but we know there's a lot of people out there
that can't stand us,
and come on, folks.
Don't hold back.
Okay, Dear Off The Hook, great show.
You see, this is the problem.
Great show.
I look forward to it every week.
I hear that all the time.
We sound really horrible, don't we?
Please tell me the artist of the exit music
at the end of last week's show.
You played some ambient music,
and I loved it.
Signed, James.
James, you were talking about last week,
and that was probably Moby.
We've been playing Moby a lot lately.
We won't be playing Moby tonight.
We'll be playing somebody else.
I hope Moby's not offended.
No, but if somebody writes in
and asks what we played,
we usually announce it the week afterwards.
That's just the way it works.
Here's something interesting.
This person wrote in,
having discovered something,
or gotten something in the mail,
Chase, is it called Chase Manhattan anymore,
or just Chase?
It's JPMorgan Chase, isn't it?
Yeah, I can't keep up.
Okay, Chase now allows you
to get basic information
about your accounts with them
through text messaging.
Yeah, by sending a text command
to their Chase mobile system
from your phone,
you can be sent a reply message
with your balance, next payment,
due date, or recent transaction history.
This sounds like it has all kinds of potential
for abuse and misuse,
considering that text messages
are not encrypted
when sent over the internet,
and that text messages
can be sent from all kinds
of non-cell phone devices.
How could Chase authenticate
the user's identity correctly
over this non-secure medium?
They don't address these security issues
at all on their website,
from the intro over there.
At Chase,
we use a variety of technologies
to help ensure
that our products and services
remain secure.
From the frequently asked questions,
is Chase mobile secure?
Yes.
At Chase, we're dedicated
to protecting your personal information,
and we use a variety of technologies
to help ensure
our products and services remain secure.
It's a variety of technologies
I really want to know more about.
So they seem to be saying,
just trust us,
but aren't they setting themselves up
for major abuse of their systems?
I'd love to hear what you guys
have to say about this
on the show sometime.
Of course, you can just go
to the chase.com site,
but thanks, Scott,
for writing in.
I believe, Bernie,
you've been in communication
with Scott and got him
to actually sign up for this service
and test it out, right?
Yeah.
He said, actually,
it seemed pretty interesting
that there's no,
it doesn't allow you
to change any account information
or do any account transfers,
but it does let you see your balance
and that sort of thing.
He's, I mean,
Scott is further experimenting with it,
and we threw some suggestions at him,
try this, try that.
So I can't try it myself
because I don't have a Chase account.
So throwing some ideas at him,
and we'll follow up on that.
Well, Scott tells us
that initially,
the signup involves Chase
sending an eight-digit activation code
to his phone.
He then entered that
on their website,
and that was it.
They sent the confirmation text message
plus two more text messages
that just listed
all the possible commands.
And let's just go over
those commands real quickly.
B-A-L to get your available balance.
B-A-L, nickname,
get available balances
for your nicknamed accounts.
History, H-I-S-T, nickname.
See a history of transactions
for your nicknamed accounts.
Due nickname, D-U-E.
Check the payment due date
for a nicknamed credit card.
Do any of your credit card accounts
have nicknames?
Am I out of it
for not having nicknames
for my credit card accounts?
I don't even know what this means.
Why would you give a nickname
to a credit card account?
Get with the program, man.
Is it like a pet or something?
Okay.
Nick, see a list
of your account nicknames.
I got to try that one.
Maybe my accounts have nicknames
I don't know about.
Help, get additional
service information.
Command, see a list
of available commands.
And stop.
That's the best one.
Stop, unsubscribe
from Chase Mobile.
Never bother me again.
Scott says,
so far I'm impressed
with the system's speed.
If I send B-A-L
for my account balance
or a HIST,
H-I-S-T,
for five latest transactions,
I receive a response
text message
in six to eight seconds.
Having tried this out,
I can see that it's way faster
and more convenient
even than logging
into their web system.
If all you need
is your account balance,
recent transactions,
or payment due date,
it's great.
Of course,
you have to be okay
with all that information
being sent to you
in clear text
through their SMS gateway.
The system cannot be used
to apply any changes
to your accounts,
like transferring funds,
opening and closing accounts.
It's essentially read-only.
And also,
at no point in my testing,
as Bernie was hoping,
did it send my account number
via text.
So apparently,
it's secure
on that level at least.
I tried to test
spoofing my from text number,
but I'm not sure
how to do that.
The number for Chase's system
is an SMS short code
of 24273,
and I'll just bet
that spells Chase.
Does it?
Could.
Yeah,
no one has a phone
in front of them,
but it probably does.
I do.
Yeah, it does.
It does.
Yep, yep.
Okay,
I've got it memorized.
And I wasn't able
to figure out a way
to send a text
to a short code
without using
an actual phone.
So if anyone has any ideas
on how to spoof
a cell phone number
and send to an SMS short code,
then we might have
a vulnerability here.
This is something
I'm actually not sure about.
Is it possible
to spoof messages
to these short codes?
If you use some
of the email gateways,
it may be possible
to spoof messages
to an actual cell phone,
but I'm not sure
of a way to spoof messages
to these short codes.
Maybe one of our listeners knows.
Not Kevin,
aren't you known
in some circles
as the spoofing king?
No, not that I know of,
but...
Caller ID,
ANI,
you know how to spoof
all these things,
don't you?
I'm not going to answer
that question.
Well, this is
a good way to answer
these questions.
The thing is,
is it possible?
Is it possible
to do this kind of spoofing?
Honestly, I have no idea,
but it's very likely.
I'm just going to
put that out there.
Okay.
Now, if anyone out there
knows how to do
this kind of spoofing
so that you can
full chase
Chase Manhattan,
JPMorgan Chase,
Time Warner Chase,
whatever they're called
this week,
please send us email
and tell us how it works
and we'll try it out.
We'll try to take
the system down.
That's not as negative
as we're making it sound,
but a system should be tested
for its strengths
and weaknesses.
OTH at 2600.com.
That's our email address,
so please send us mail.
I'm actually generally worried
about this system
as Chase is also the bank
that seemed to have
thrown out 40,000 records
of their customers last year
in their trash bags.
Yeah.
Yeah, isn't that something?
So you sort of have
to test them out.
You sort of have to test
their security.
Well, it looks like
we're just about out of time,
and as we said
at the beginning of the show,
we couldn't take phone calls
this week because
we're in a different studio.
We're in Studio 3
down the hall,
and we don't have access
to the delay button.
We're on delay,
but we can't press the button
in case somebody
said something bad.
We couldn't bleep them out
without being in a different room
at the same time,
so that's just the way it goes,
but next week.
Next week is a different story,
and please feel free
to give us a call then.
We're going to leave now,
and we believe
the Personal Computer Show
is going to come at you
from a different studio.
I saw them poking
their heads in,
so they're somewhere.
Well, I think they're curious
as to what we're doing in here
instead of in the room
we're supposed to be in.
In fact, I'm assuming,
I'm going on a big assumption here
that this whole hour
we're actually on the air.
We're not just talking
to ourselves
in this little tiny room
down the hall.
I have evidence of that.
Okay, well,
it wouldn't be the first time.
There's so many shows
that we've done
that nobody has ever heard,
but that's going to do it
for us tonight.
I want to thank everybody
for presumably listening,
and I just had to figure out
why...
Ah, yes.
There we go.
I pressed the wrong button.
We'll be back again next week
with a normal show, supposedly.
Again, the email address
oth at 2600.com
for your feedback,
letters, praise,
and, of course, hate mail.
Always welcome.
It's a manual for Mike,
not Kevin and Bernie.
Have yourselves a good night,
and we'll be in touch.
Stay tuned for
the Personal Computer Show.
Good night.
electronic music plays
electronic music plays
electronic music plays
electronic music plays
electronic music plays
electronic music plays