This Thursday, a committee of the State Assembly will discuss a resolution that would, quote,
apologize for the wrongs inflicted by slavery and its aftereffects in the United States of America.
In the South, legislatures in Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia
have made similar statements of regret for slavery.
For Free Speech Radio News, I'm Tanya Snyder in Washington.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News. From KPFK in LA, I'm Aura Bogado.
And a very good evening to everyone. You're listening to WBAI New York,
where the time is 7 p.m. Stay tuned for Off the Hook.
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!
And good evening. The show is Off the Hook. I'm Red Bird, joined in the studio by Mike.
Hi there.
Not Kevin.
Hello.
And do we have Emmanuel on the phone?
We might if we turned him up. Emmanuel, are you there now?
This happens every time, doesn't it? Yes, I'm here. I'm here. I want to be heard if I'm brought up.
Okay. And Bernie S. as well.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
There we go.
I should point out that I'm talking to you on a cell phone, which normally
would be enough to give me a heart attack talking to somebody from Germany using my own cell phone.
But what I'm doing is I'm using this little-known company known as Ortel,
which Mike discovered, and I'm paying nine cents a minute.
I could walk anywhere around Germany and talk to you for that price.
Ortel.
That's nine euro cents, so that's like a hundred dollars.
No, well, nine euro cents is actually like about, what, 14 US cents or maybe less.
Yeah, something like that. That's not bad.
How did you discover this particular company? I mean, we talked about it last week. We weren't
sure it was going to work last week because we didn't actually have the thing in place,
but we've been using it now. You just got back from Germany, and we were the envy of everybody
at the Chaos Communication Camp, or Congress, rather. I keep mixing it up.
They were paying a dollar a minute or more sometimes. We're paying nine cents a minute.
How do you go out and find something like this?
Well, I was looking on the internet for sort of affordable
SIM cards. There's these companies that, what they do is they import foreign SIM cards into
the States and then sell you them at inflated markups. They'll charge you like $60 for a SIM
card, which will cost you just, well, we paid 13 euros in Germany to buy it.
But the card itself is a good deal if you ignore the markup of the US company. I looked into it.
They have this website, which is in like six languages, English among them, so I could learn
all about it. They seem to resell the service of this company called ePlus, which is one of the
big German mobile phone companies. But somehow in their reselling, they make calls, and
particularly international calls, quite cheap. Well, I have seven euros and 65 cents on my SIM
right now, and I hope it's enough to make this hour-long radio program. The other interesting
thing about all this is that if you want to refill your card, you can do it in any number of ways.
You can do it online. You can do it at an ePlus store. But the one I found to be most interesting
was actually going down into a train station and going to the ticket machine. And on the train
ticket machine, you can actually add money to your phone card or SIM card, rather.
Now, formerly, the cheapest way to do this that I found was to either use one of those phone cards
that sort of routes you through a VOIP network, but you'd have to use that from a payphone,
or something like Skype, where you can make phone calls for a couple of cents a minute.
How do I sound, by the way?
You sound great. It's very nice that this technology now has progressed to the point
where you can use it over your cell phone. What's the spelling of this company again, Ortel?
Yeah, the name of the company is Ortel. They appear to also have operations in
Belgium and in the Netherlands, but having not been there recently,
I can't report on how well they work.
That's O-R-T-E-L?
Yes.
Mike, you did find this deal before going to Germany, so I'm wondering
if maybe we could ask you to find similar deals in other countries, maybe all of the countries,
and that way we can tell people, our listeners who travel around the world,
how they can call back to the States and other places, too, for very cheap.
Well, we've listed three countries so far, and there's, what, 160 countries, so that's about 2%.
All right. Well, Mike is working on that. Let's talk about the Chaos Communication Congress,
which just finished a couple of days ago here in Berlin. I have to say it was, as usual,
an amazing show, quite a spectacle, a lot of good talks, about 100 talks, I'd say, over four days.
Even this time, they had a demonstration, I guess a political demonstration, outside
the actual Congress Hall. By Congress Hall, I mean basically a convention center,
a place where talks can be given. But outside, they were giving a demonstration, and it actually
drew some attention from the police. Mike, what were the specifics about this demonstration?
Well, I didn't actually get a chance to attend, but from what I understand,
the main issues were this coming German surveillance state. In the United States,
we already have, of course, a surveillance state, but in Germany—
We're very proud of it.
Yes. In Germany, it's coming. Just while we were there, on January 1st,
they started something called data retention, which means every phone call you make,
every webpage you visit, the provider is required to keep a log of that and provide it
upon request—I'm not sure of the details—to the government. The BAI Evening News actually
just had a story about that, but we got to see our calls being logged in person, I guess.
So somewhere in Germany, there is a log of this phone call that we're having right now.
You're still there?
Yeah, I'm here, I'm here.
Okay. There are a lot of other issues, related issues. The information minister—not the
information minister—the interior minister of Germany, whose face adorns the shirt I'm wearing
right now, said very famously that no one's trying to build a surveillance society, which
echoes very famously a quote made just before the Berlin Wall was put up by the head of East Germany
who said, no one's trying to build a wall here. So the opinion of many of the Germans that we met
in particular seems to be that they were telling about the same amount of truth.
Interesting. Now, the demonstration took place midway through the Congress. I noticed all these
police fans—in fact, this was about the most police presence I've seen in the whole city
during the week I've been here, and keep in mind that that week has included New Year's,
New Year's Eve—there were about maybe five vans, starting with a big van and getting progressively
smaller until it hit the size of a minivan, just basically sitting outside the hall,
not even getting out of the van. I guess when you have a demonstration, an announced demonstration,
police presence just is something that happens. I guess the same thing happens in the state,
except they get out of the vans there. And it went on for about maybe a half hour, 45 minutes,
a lot of chanting, sign-holding, good times for everybody. And I like to think that the word
really got out. It seems when you say something here in Germany, people listen. You can have
demonstrations of thousands of people for issues that wouldn't barely get any attention in the
States. So I have a lot of hope that they'll be able to actually turn some heads and make some
changes in this ill-conceived law. People always complain when they
perceive us to be talking about politics without mentioning technology. So we should
point out the high-tech nature of some of the protest signs they had at this demonstration.
Yes.
They had these devices with sort of little projectors and little screens
shaped into sort of cartoony thought bubbles. So the person could type on a keyboard,
which was sort of harnessed to him, and above his head in the thought bubble would appear as text.
It was quite neat.
It was interesting, yes. I've never seen anything quite like that. And the crowd loved it,
and they were sort of parading around all night long throughout the whole conference.
So that was pretty cool. What were some of the talks that you went to at the Congress that
stood out in your mind?
Well, there were a number. Our friend Johannes from Monochrome did a talk about the image of
computers in pop music, and I guess we'll play a sample song at the end of the show. But that
was a lot of fun, and I don't know if I'd call it informative, but it was a lot of fun.
I also went to a talk by this guy, Arjen, from the Netherlands, who has almost single-handedly
managed to rewrite the IT policy of his national government, the Dutch government, so that they
will now make every attempt possible to adhere to open file formats and free and open source
software whenever possible. And it was a fascinating talk, both for what he was able
to achieve and sort of how he was able to achieve it. So that was quite interesting.
Anything in particular you want to mention?
Well, I saw a number of talks, too. I saw Rob's talk about electronic voting, which I thought was
pretty amazing. A couple of other random ones on various technical and non-technical topics.
One of the ones that stood out, actually, somebody we're going to be giving a call to
in a couple of minutes over in Amsterdam. Bicycle Mark was talking about the Arctic.
This is kind of interesting, the melting of the polar ice cap and how that's going to affect
commerce, international commerce, and the various craziness that's going on amongst
certain countries. And you wouldn't think that kind of a thing would be talked about
at a hacker conference, but the crowd was very interested in what was being said, and
the room was packed. So I guess you can open up these conferences to all sorts of different topics
and still remain relevant. And I think that's something we should take a good look at here
in the States. So that was one of the highlights for me. Of course, just the presence of the thing,
just being able to hang out there 24 hours a day for four days and just meet people,
see people that you've maybe talked to online, see people that you may have only heard about,
and just making those connections, going out places and having good conversations. I think
that's what conferences are really all about. And I hope to see all these people at the HOPE
conference coming up in July, now this year, now that it's 2008. So I think this CCC get-together
was, again, one of the most important events of the year. Now, on the last show, we had talked
about the move toward logging biometric data from citizens and having various governmental agencies
keep record of that data. And I was wondering if you saw any talks about subverting that
sort of thing, like fingerprint scanners and iris scanners and stuff like that.
I didn't see a talk like that myself. I know there were talks like that. I don't have the
schedule right in front of me. I don't know, Mike, did you see anything like that?
On that topic specifically, no. It was, of course, a very popular topic of discussion.
One of the interesting things that people were trying to determine was how to obtain a prepaid
SIM card anonymously. And that is something that is apparently difficult in Germany.
When you buy most kinds of SIM cards, you're required to show your ID card, and they take
down all your details. So you can do tricks with getting other people to buy it for you and all
this stuff. But you discovered another trick, Emanuel. Well, actually, well, first I watched
you. You were the guinea pig. You got the Ortel card from the Eplus store, Eplus being the phone
company, one of the phone companies here. And they just gave it to you. They handed it over,
and then you had to call a number to activate it. Kind of a crazy system that you have to call a
number to activate a phone, because what if you don't have a phone? It's kind of crazy. I don't
think you'd activate it in a store. But anyway, you have to call this number, and they ask you
all these questions, including your name, your date of birth, where you lived, and various things
like that. Were there any other questions that I missed? No, I don't think so. But I remember when
I was in Amsterdam with you guys... How would you know? You weren't the one who was answering
the questions. Oh, well, Mike was playing with the phone. Yeah, what was the question? I can't
answer your question and their question at the same time. Okay, whether or not there were any
other questions that they asked you, apart from date of birth, address, name? The phone number and
the SIM card number were the only other questions. Okay. So basically, you answered the questions,
truthfully, because you thought you had to. And I should point out, they had a terrible time with my
address, because I gave them my US address, not being German. And they did not understand the
concept of a street name where the street name was a number. Right. So I had learned that after
you had gone through all that and given all the truthful information. And I just gave all fake
information, completely 100% bona fide fake, not a single bit of truth in it, not first name, last
name, address, anything. It was all fake. And it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. So I was
able to get a completely anonymous SIM. I don't know what I get for getting a completely anonymous
SIM. I'm able to make phone calls. And people don't know it's me. Well, the people I call know
it's me. But people who are monitoring the SIM, I guess, don't know my real name. I never knew that
was something that they really needed to know in the first place. And I guess this is proof that
they don't really need to know. Well, one of the things that's important to remember is that it's
always possible to track the IMEI number. So it's known that you're connecting to the cellular
network with your phone. And then if they were to contact U.S. carriers and find out if any other
SIM cards were in use with that same IMEI number, it may be eventually possible to track it back to
your accounts. That would, of course... How are they going to know it's me if I don't ever give
them my name? Well, you presumably gave the U.S. carriers your name. Yeah, okay. I see what you're
saying. Because the phone is connected to my account in the United States. So they'll piece
it together. Right. Now, I don't remember having to go through this process at all when I was in
Amsterdam and I purchased a prepaid SIM card at... I forget where we went to purchase one. No, in
Holland, you don't have to do this. But in Germany, you do. Okay. Well, it's the only place you can
purchase a phone without having to give you a name. Yeah, actually, it's a lot more common to
be able to purchase unlocked phones from just store vendors. And I think I did that last time
I was in Switzerland, I believe. And yeah, it's not a problem. I mean, you could just buy a phone
for cash. Bernie, do you have something on this? Yeah, last year, I was in... Every year, I go to
Hannover for the CeBIT conference. And there's a village about a half an hour outside of Hannover
called Celle. And we... Myself and my traveling companion, we purchased cell phones there
unlocked and a prepaid SIM. But you had to show a passport to purchase them. So this is a new
development, being able to buy one anonymously. Of course, in the U.S. here, you can purchase
them anonymously very easily at most drugstores. So it's interesting that in this country where
there's a lot of surveillance. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Did you hear me for the past
couple minutes? Just like five seconds, you seem to have disappeared.
Where am I? What's going on here? I feel like I'm lost in space.
Well, in Germany, I was saying last year, I could purchase an unlocked GSM phone and a prepaid SIM
card. But I had to show my passport to purchase it. This was in the town of Celle outside of
Hannover. But here in the States, in the U.S., you can purchase a cell phone, not unlocked. You
can buy a locked cell phone and a prepaid SIM at most drugstores without any identification at all.
So that seems to be sort of counterintuitive. You'd think in the U.S. you'd have to even give
up more identification, but not here yet. Well, we just keep learning more and more
about how to make phone calls over the years. We've been doing this show now for almost 20
years. Actually, this is our 20th year right now. And we're still learning more and more about it.
Of course, the playing field has changed incredibly. Back in 1988, going to Europe
and making a phone call would cost a huge amount of money to the United States. And now,
nine cents a minute from a cell phone. That's simply incredible.
Joining us on the phone now from Amsterdam, I don't know how much this is costing us,
but we're talking to Bicycle Mark. Are you there?
I am there. It's not costing you anything. It's costing you
a call to Philadelphia because I'm using a voice over IP number there.
Wow, this is incredible. So we're not even calling overseas, even though you are overseas?
Exactly.
Well, that's truly amazing. Well, Mark, I want to say that your talk was one of the best ones I saw
at the conference. And that, of course, is the one about the melting of the Arctic,
well, the Arctic, the melting of the entire Arctic, I guess, and the opening of the Northwest
Passage, a new route for freighters to go through, and oil rigs, oil tankers, and various things like
that. What made you decide to give a talk on a subject like that at a hacker conference?
The first time I gave a talk at a hacker conference was last Congress, so 23C3. And that
was Tim Pritlove, who you know, who invited me to speak. And he asked me to please speak about
what I do as a sort of podcasting journalist. So that was fun. And I enjoyed it a lot because,
as you said, there's lots of interesting people there. But what I also enjoyed was,
for me, there's never enough of social, political topics. There's a lot of stuff about technology,
and yes, how technology affects lives. But sometimes I would look down the list and I'd
think, well, I'm glad to be one of the social and political topic people who brings it. And they
liked it so much that they invited me back for the camp. And so this year, they said, oh, by the way,
for the next Congress, which of course, we'd like it if you'd come and speak, the topic or the theme
should be something to do with global warming and how nerds can survive global warming or the
apocalypse, as you probably saw talk on that. So I was already working on my own program that I do
on the internet, on the topic of the Arctic, not so much melting, of course, there's that and also
the buildup of military that is going on between Canada, Russia, especially Russia and Canada,
but US as well. And then there's Denmark, who's not so much building military as they are just
trying to build some kind of presence with scientists and also political muscle, if they
have any. Right now, you pointed out that Canada and Denmark, and Russia and some other countries
were all at loggerheads about who owns this particular piece of the earth.
Yeah, I mean, that that piece of the earth known as the Arctic, like the Antarctic is supposed to
be, well, it's not owned by anyone, it's administered by the United Nations, the
International Law of the Sea, which apparently governs a lot of things if you try to read the
text. And it includes the Arctic. So if you're Canada, you know, you go right up until the edge
of the archipelago. And then you get 200 nautical miles that that's true for any country, you get 200
nautical miles, that's yours, whatever's under the water, it's also yours, you can mine it, you could
pollute it, although I'd like to protest if you do. And now they're trying to say that, you know
what, there's an underwater ridge, and it connects us to the Arctic, Russia is saying this, Denmark
is saying this, Canada is saying this. And they're saying, therefore, the Arctic is actually ours,
because there's an underwater ridge. And that's why, over the summer, Russia planted a flag on
the ocean floor. And it was very exciting. I think that's very silly. They actually went
underwater and planted a flag on the floor of the ocean. Yeah, it was a robotic arm. And I think
the flag is made from I might need to be corrected, I think titanium or something. So rust.
And this is to show the world that look, not only does Russia say this is ours, we're actually
taking action. And you know, just like in the old colonial days, you go somewhere and you plant a
flag, and it's now yours. Do you think that there's actually danger of fisticuffs or missiles
or something being fired as a result of this little dispute going on? I called my talk the
Arctic Cold War. And I wasn't really well, okay, a play on words is always fun. But I was really
thinking of the Cold War that we all most of us grew up with. And I think there is a danger that
countries are building up weapons and weapons systems because they are. And they're going to
build up so much that they're going to put a lot of power into the hands of certain people, world
leaders, country leaders. And all we need is someone to mess up, as we almost had, for example,
in the Cuban Missile Crisis, to launch a attack that kills 1000s, millions, who knows. So I don't
think that fisticuffs are necessarily going to happen. But I think that this build up this
mentality that was popular during the Cold War is coming back. And once again, the logic is,
let's build up as many dangerous weapons of mass destruction as possible to show the other side how
tough we are. And of course, we won't fire this is just to show our you know, each other. But I
think there's as soon as you start doing that, again, especially with a new and easy to use
weapons, we now have, there's a big danger that somebody accidentally presses a button,
or gets mad or gets drunk and launches an attack.
Well, that's, that's kind of scary and disturbing. But what bothers me, I think the most about this
whole thing is that people are arguing or governments are arguing about something that
shouldn't even be in the first place, we shouldn't be able to to drive ships through this particular
part of the world. During the winter time, or even during the summertime, it's supposed to be
frozen. And now that it's it's it's getting unfrozen because of global warming. They're
actually bickering over how to make the most money out of this. And I get the feeling that
that correcting the problem that led to this in the first place is not very high in their
priority priority list at this point. No, I mean, this is a lot like a country.
Sometimes I think the Netherlands is one of these countries, they kind of take joy
in the fact that the weather is getting warmer. So at least it's not miserable anymore.
Nevermind the fact that the place will flood. I use that as an example, just because yes,
people are governments are planning already for this new warm Arctic or warmer Arctic.
And they're kind of salivating a little bit, either for themselves as governments or for
their corporations, who of course are friends, who are going to be able to make a mighty profit,
especially I mean, I just flipped on I guess, one of the news channels and oil went above
100 or did it or that's what I saw anyway. Went above 100, stock market plunged.
Yeah. And so now, you know, in the Arctic, you have a significant amount of what they believe
are significant amount of oil reserves. If Russia gets them, for example, Russia will control,
according to some estimates, two thirds of the world's not only oil, but we're talking total
hydrocarbon. So they include gas. And they, you know, they'll then compete with the likes of
Saudi Arabia in terms of power of controlling your energy. They already do. So these countries
are already way ahead of the they don't even care so much if it slows, you know, we need to talk
about slowing down the melting, of course, but they're they're way ahead. They decided, never
mind that we can't slow down the melting. Why bother? Because up there, this is going to be
a great place to do some business. You can take your ship over through the Arctic. You don't have
to go through that Panama Canal where we have to pay a toll. You can you don't have to go through
that Suez necessarily anymore. You can go through the Northwest passage passage, you go right over
Canada. We'll see what happens with if you have to pay anything. And they're looking at it as a
huge business opportunity. And that's it. How do you think this fit into a hacker conference?
Well, on a general sense, it doesn't fit in with, you know, technology and that sort of discussion
of what a lot of people like there. But I think where it fits is the sort of hacker mind or the
spirit of someone that wants to look behind what is going on. And I'm I'm invited, thankfully,
as a sort of media hacker, because I look or I try to look behind what I'm given in the news.
I try to look in the back pages or in the small print. So the reason I believe I'm at these hacker
congresses and conferences is to appeal to that mind that wants to, in this case, look behind the
news that they're given behind the reality that they're given. So if you're given the reality
that, hey, the Arctic is melting, that's life. And wherever there's oil, you know, people are
going to go for it. So don't worry. And a lot of the public seems to sort of swallow this pretty
easily. I've heard a lot of people in Moscow saying, well, people are too busy in Moscow to
worry about this energy is good for Russia and it's good for Russia, then that's good.
So the reason I go and what I think this fits with is the hacker mentality that says, you know,
I'm not going to just take what I'm given as reality and truth. I'm going to look behind it.
And beyond that, hopefully the type of, again, hacker mind that is concerned about the world
and concerned about how they might change it, influence it, learn about it. So I was pleased,
like you said, I was listening before, that a lot of people did show up. I think it was my
largest audience ever that was fairly well attended. And I saw people in there who I know
are not so leaning towards politics or even social issues necessarily. But when they listened
and they thought about it themselves, they had their own concerns. And that's what I like.
I agree. I agree. It's very, very compelling talk. And I think it's it's it's proof that you
don't always just have to be talking about the technical issues. I obviously lean more towards
the social issues myself. And I think it's great to see people listen to something like this and
get something out of it. And I see a point about it being something a hacker audience would
appreciate. So that's something. I really hope it grows. I always look at the schedule and I hope to
see more people doing a topic that makes you go, oh, oh, what's this? Some some part of the world
or some issue besides. And of course, it's important to talk about privacy and file formats
and open source. But I'm interested in more issues coming into these conferences.
We're talking to Bicycle Mark over in Amsterdam, but we're talking to you by way of Philadelphia.
And that's got nothing to do with Bernie S is also in Philadelphia. We're using a we're using
a Skype number to get to you. Yes, you are. I have a Skype number in Philadelphia that reaches me
wherever I am on my computer and hopefully one day on my portable device, whatever that may be.
What's the verdict back in the studio as to how his voice quality sounds?
You can you can definitely tell he his compression is different than the GSM compression,
but it doesn't sound like a landline call. But, you know, it's good enough.
Well, whose compression is better? I'm going to say that you're both
sound better than Bernie S, who is actually in Philadelphia. So that's something.
So wait, the two people in Europe sound better than the person in Philadelphia.
I think that's the case. Bernie, say something and prove it.
I represent that remark. I resemble that. I resemble that remark.
No, I think you represent it just fine. That's that's something. Well,
Bernie, of course, your phone company is? It's a Sprint PCS. It's a different
different kind of compression. This is a I'm not sure which vocoder they're using, but it's a
it's it's more compressed because they're using CDMA as opposed to the GSM phones
phone that you're using. And I don't know what kind of compression Skype uses.
Is that the standard like H323 or something else?
I believe, buddy, I don't I believe it's proprietary. I don't I don't think there
are that many details as as to what Skype uses. I should mention one thing.
One thing I try to do to improve the sound since I'm a podcaster anyway, I have a small
condenser mic and I run that into my computer when I know it's a phone call that I want to
sound hopefully better than, say, the built in on your computer.
Yeah, and that definitely helps to eliminate feedback, which I've had a problem with with
Skype and other VIP software.
Well, bicycle mark, we're talking to you from Amsterdam and our satellite window will be
closing soon. So we want to get as much out of view as possible in the remaining moments that
we have. You spent New Year's in Berlin, as did Mike. I'd like to get both of your
impressions of what you saw this this past week.
Do you want to go first, Mark?
Go for it. Oh, OK. My impressions of New Year's in Berlin. It's my second New
Year's in Berlin and it's like organized chaos. So it's very exciting. And what's great is it
doesn't matter where you go. People talk a lot. I grew up in New Jersey. We talk a lot about
where are you going on New Year's? Are you going to Times Square or wherever in Berlin?
You could just step outside your door and hopefully or most likely your neighbors will
put on a show. You yourself will put on the show. You can just enjoy yourself on the street.
As you probably mentioned, I saw no police. I never see any police.
That's interesting. I've been warned many times that I should fear for my personal safety because
people would be firing fireworks directly at me. And that did not happen. I felt quite safe.
But there were many of us were at this party and went outside to look around and many people at
the party brought their own fireworks. And, Emanuel, I believe you attacked a building.
All right. Let's just get this clear right away. OK. Nothing I did was intentional. All I did was
go to a shop before I went to the party and buy two bottle rockets. It cost me about five euros
for two bottle rockets and one small one, one slightly larger one. Now, Bicycle Mark, you
shot off the smaller one out of a bottle, correct? I did. I was the inaugural shot and
it was a successful launch. It went straight up into the air and went boom and had colors.
That's what I thought I was going to do. Apparently, I had a different kind of
bottle rocket. It was slightly bigger. Like I said, I put it into the same bottle. You saw me.
I lit the thing, stood back like I'm supposed to. The thing went sailing straight up into the air.
And then as soon as it got to the top floor of the apartment building, it made a 90 degree turn
and went directly down to the balcony of that poor apartment. And I just remember looking in horror
as the entire balcony just lit up red. And I expected to hear screams or have horrible things
poured on me or all sorts of commotion. But you know what? There was no commotion at all. It was
just one of those things that happens on New Year's Eve. Everybody lived through it. I don't
know if anybody was even home, but the building didn't burn down. I don't know why that happened.
It should have gone straight up. Instead, it made a right turn like that. It was a heat seeking
bottle rocket or something. I don't know. But yeah, that's an example of some of the fun things
that can happen when you're playing around Berlin. What I found amazing was... Go ahead.
Who's going ahead?
Oh, I thought I heard somebody talking there. I was hearing my echo.
You can continue.
I will continue then. You can just wander around the entire city, like Mike said, and just see...
Well, is it Mike or Mark? I'm not sure who said it, but you just see
evidence of this kind of celebration going on in every single part of the city.
The day afterwards, of course, it was a fantastic mess. Fireworks, remnants, and
bottles, broken bottles too, all over the place. I went on an S-Bahn, which is basically
kind of like a subway here in Berlin. I had to kill time. I had to walk around because I didn't
have a place to stay until about one o'clock in the afternoon. There were no hotel rooms to be
found anywhere. I just kept myself busy walking around various parts of the city, riding trains,
and one of the trains I got on was just... It was so messy and disgusting. There were all kinds
of things on it that I don't even want to discuss on the air, but obviously, people had done all
kinds of things. Even the fireworks on the train, it looked like, because there were all those
remnants of fireworks there. Like Mike said, there were no cops. I think you both said that.
Well, regardless of who said it, there were no cops anywhere. You didn't see them. If there
were cops, they were pretty much hidden. Obviously, in New York, where I've spent many New Years,
you see cops every place. You get the sense that you can't do anything out of line. Here,
you had people basically doing everything out of line. The next day, it's over. The next day,
people clean it up and they get on with their lives. An example, January 1st, a no smoking ban
law went into effect here in Berlin. You can no longer smoke in cafes or bars.
It's just being observed. I walked by... There's a cafe in the hotel I'm staying at. It's sort of
an indoor cafe. Every time we walked by it during the conference, it would be very smoky because
people would be smoking there. Today, I walked by it and just completely clean air, no smoke,
because now it's illegal to smoke like that. There aren't any no smoking signs up. People
just are obeying the law because they're aware of the law. That's the kind of society it is.
You don't need this constant police presence to make you do things. People just... They know how
it works. They go crazy one day a year, then they go back to normal. I think that's pretty amazing.
It does worry me a little bit how much garbage they make on this night, but I suppose everyone
would just tell me to relax, but it is pretty shocking. There's not much garbage left. I
walked around earlier today and it looks just about as clean as... There's a few little piles
in various places, but they've done a tremendous job cleaning the place up. Another thing that
I see not only on New Year's, but throughout the course of life here in Germany, people aren't as
freaked out over alcohol or even how old you have to be to drink alcohol. I think the drinking age
here is 16. You see people walking around with open bottles, not in paper bags either.
You rarely see people acting completely stupid. Occasionally it happens, but I see more of that
on the streets of the Lower East Side than I do here in all the times I've been here.
I just wonder, how did we get so different? How did we get so completely
alien to something like this? Do we really think the way we do things over in the States is the
right way to do it with all the problems that it seems to cause? Along the same lines, I also
noticed today you and I walked around before I left Berlin and we were recording in a station,
a train slash metro station. I know you've had a lot of experience with places where you can
and cannot do that, but I was just a little bit surprised or pleased that it was a place where,
well, no one tried to stop us. No one tried to say, this is a private train company building,
you cannot record. No, we walked around, we recorded. That's right. I hear from so many
of my friends in the States who like to take pictures of various things. They're always being
told to stop, you need a permit, this is illegal, Homeland Security, blah, blah, blah. Here in
Germany, you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt somebody or cause all
kinds of mayhem, except on the 31st of December when you're allowed to cause mayhem. I walked
around Hauptbahnhof, which is the main train station here in Berlin. After I dropped Mike
off, after he took off to Hamburg to take his train back to the plane when he flew back to
the States yesterday, I basically decided to wander around that station and explore it.
And I noticed that downstairs was track one through eight and upstairs was track 11 through
16. So that, of course, led me to ask the question, well, where's track nine and 10?
And for the next maybe hour, I just walked around every inch of the station looking for the missing
tracks. I went up to track 11 and I looked over to see if maybe there was a track 10 next to it.
That was the upper level of the station, so I didn't see a track. I went downstairs and looked
to the left of track eight and I saw this metal barrier where a track could be. So then I explored
a little bit more. I climbed a staircase, went into what had to have been a restricted area,
and discovered that this was a future U-Bahn station, which is another subway they have here.
And that's where the missing tracks were. It took me over an hour. I was wandering around looking
at all these nooks and crannies. Anybody watching me would have thought, what in God's name is that
guy doing? He's obviously not taking a train. He must be questioned and interrogated. But
everybody just went about their business and it just felt right.
It's a very different dynamic than we have here in the States.
Absolutely, it is. Well, bicycle mark, any final words for me? Because we have to get on another
guest from another part of the world. I'll let you guys go. Just one final thought would be,
now, of course, we're talking about Berlin and we're comparing it a lot to the U.S.
Obviously, people listening might know that there are lots of cities in Europe where the case is
different. I know, I remember when you went to London, you had some trouble with recording,
I believe. Well, London is where this is changing.
Yeah, London is very similar to a city in the U.S. because they are extremely paranoid
and constantly interrogating and questioning people. That's a very sad situation.
I find it interesting, too, looking at the reports of what happened on New Year's Eve.
I see reports of violence in the States. I see reports of violence in England.
I've been looking. I have not seen any reports of violence in a country like this. Those people who
say that, yeah, they're naive here in Germany because they don't understand the importance
of security, look to yourself and ask yourself if the way you have it is any better because I think
that kind of thing just maybe propagates violence even more than it fights it.
You know, I'm looking here at the Privacy International just the other day released
a study called Leading Surveillance Societies Around the World, and it seems to confirm what
we've been discussing. They rate every country on a scale from one to five based on how nice
a place they are in terms of privacy, and no country got higher than a 3.1, which was in Greece,
but the U.K. is down at the bottom of the barrel of Europe, 1.4. The U.S., only slightly higher, 1.5,
and these are described in the range of endemic surveillance societies along with other lovely
countries like Singapore, Russia, China, Malaysia, and Germany is doing a bit better. They're at
2.8, I believe, so there is differences, and they're actually measurable differences
among these different countries.
And it's really a fascinating map to look at and very colorful too.
If you go to privacyinternational.org, and you'll see on the home page something about the
map of surveillance societies around the world. It's a great map to check out and see how your country rates.
Okay, well, Pascal, Mark, I want to thank you very much for being on the show. We're going to make another phone call now and to another part of the world to see how that person sounds, and we hope to see you at the HOPE conference in July.
Yes, I look forward to it.
Okay, well, thanks for being with us tonight.
Take care, guys.
Okay, I'm going to now hang up and place more phone calls, but I'm sure there's a lot more to talk about.
Well, yes, I'm sure.
I am here.
Haven't heard from you tonight. Too bad you couldn't make it to this conference, but I know you've seen Berlin.
Ah, that I have, but not as much as I wanted to.
Well, you know, I've got to say, I've seen parts of it today and the last couple of days that I haven't seen before. I've wandered around on the S-Bahn, seen various communities, villages that weren't the places I'd gone to before, so it's a great city to wander around, just to walk and take in the sights, and I'd like to think more people will do that in future conferences.
The Chaos Communication Congress takes place every year on the same days.
It takes place on the 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th of December, regardless of what day of the week that falls on.
So you have no excuse.
No excuse for not planning next year to be here.
Okay, so I'm apparently the only person with anything to say.
You're going to take advantage of that, not Kevin?
Well, I don't know.
All right.
Let me continue by saying that what you do when you're in a place like this is you kind of find little niches, places that you go to that have things that you want.
Like, I know Mike, when he was here, discovered a place underground that had cheap water that you could buy and things like that.
You find your favorite phone store to find parts for your phone, maybe, or to get phone cards or decent food places.
People I know, Americans are very worried about going to foreign countries or even calling foreign countries.
People I know are afraid to even SMS a foreign country.
So it's something that we have to get over and we have to kind of become more worldly, I guess.
Do we have our phone connection yet?
We do.
Okay, joining us now from maybe a kilometer or so away from where I am is our friend Mitch Altman, who right now is in a pirate radio station somewhere in Berlin.
Mitch, can you hear me?
I can hear you fine.
How is my audio quality?
Well, you sound like you're on a phone, but that's to be expected.
How does Mitch's audio quality compare to Bicycle Morphix and to my audio quality?
It's better.
I would say it was worse.
I would say it's much better.
Okay.
Well, you guys can fight it out after the show.
Mitch, tell us something about this pirate radio station you're at right now.
Well, this is in a building which I'm told used to be a squat.
Is it still a squat here?
No, no longer a squat.
No, no longer a squat, but it was literally bombed out.
There are bullet holes in the back, and in the back, there's all of these totally cool art projects.
And as I speak, there's a wall, a huge wall with video projections on it, kind of inexplicable.
You'd have to come and check it out.
This room that I'm in is fixed up.
It's all brick with some curtains for deadening the sound.
And evidently, this is like 24-7 transmitting over the Internet.
And since it's illegal to transmit with a high-power transmitter without getting it licensed,
which is prohibitively expensive, they passed out lots of micropower FM transmitters.
Just today, there was a workshop in building these things.
They passed them out to billions of people who then play the audio from the Internet
out in these micropower FM transmitters.
And it just blankets these neighborhoods of Berlin where just about anyone can listen.
So it's a really cool little setup.
I've never heard of anything like this being done.
And it's a place, it's kind of like a hacker space where people can come and hang out.
People, as I've been here for many hours today, just come and go, hang out, have conversations.
Maybe have a drink or two.
I'm trying to read someone's hand now.
What are you saying?
It's a very important radio.
Hand signals are very important radio.
It's called Boot Lab.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The name of the place is Boot Lab.
And it's in an area of town called Mitte, which is, as Emanuel said, about a kilometer away
from his hotel where he's staying.
So we're speaking to each other via international communications.
We could almost just do a tin can.
Anyway, this is a really cool place.
I've been happy to be here all day.
Now, how'd you go about finding this place?
A friend of mine from San Francisco who lives in Berlin brought me here.
And we've been hanging out together all day.
So that's how I got here.
Now, Mitch, we were talking about the conference before.
And, of course, you were at the conference.
People were building TV-B-Gons.
They were building brain machines.
And yes, folks, by the way, the brain machines you pledged for, they are on the way.
Probably in the next couple of weeks, you'll get them.
But there was an incident, from what I heard, at the Congress.
You want to tell us what happened involving the TV-B-Gons?
Yeah, well, I had an ongoing workshop where I was helping people learn to solder and build
cool things with microcontrollers.
My idea was to give people the hardware bug, so to speak.
And evidently, it worked.
A lot of people have built things for the first time in life.
And they're just so happy.
People, when they build things, they smile.
They're helping one another, supporting one another.
And hopefully, they'll go out and build cool things on their own with their own ideas as
a result.
One of the projects is a TV-B-Gon kit, which we released, me and Lady Atta got together
and built this kit, which turns off TVs from 50 meters away.
And 200 people built these things at the conference.
And there happens to be this very convenient field testing location just across the street
from the Congress, the conference, called MediaMarkt, Media Market.
And they have huge walls of TV from, wouldn't you know it, like 40 or 50 meters
away, so people couldn't resist but go over there.
And it became a badge of honor to get kicked out.
And there was a running tally.
I'm not sure how many people actually got kicked out, because I lost track before I
left, and I didn't see the sign.
But something like, what, 30 people got kicked out.
Three people got detained, one of whom got arrested.
And they claimed that he turned off an 80,000 euro television.
So that, what, 80,000 euros, what, that's about $50, is it?
No, no, no, $150,000 maybe.
Okay, yeah, it's absurd.
Like, I wonder, for one thing, why would any manufacturer build such a thing?
But even more important, why would anyone buy such a thing?
But why would anyone turn one off?
That's an obvious answer to me, because it's there.
So this person turned it off, just like I did earlier, just like many other people did
earlier.
And of course, the people there are running around like crazy, people turning on all of
the TVs that get turned off.
After a while, they actually had people assigned to areas of television so that they could
turn them back on in a timely manner after they are turned off.
Anyways, this TV gets turned off, and they claimed that it was impossible to turn it
back on.
Later, they changed their story to say that it was impossible to turn it back off.
This is actually quite absurd, because it's just, TV-Gone is just a remote control with
all those extraneous buttons gone, because I just left the power button so you could
turn TVs off.
And it's just a remote control like any other otherwise, so it turns TVs off, the power
button can turn it on, and the remote control can turn it off or on.
Of course, they can do other useful things like change the channel, etc.
So this is absurd.
There's no way that charge is going to stick.
That's going to be dropped.
So they came up with another civil suit, which is that it was disruption of business, and
they're losing money as a result.
I don't believe they'll be able to make that one stick either.
So they're probably just going to drop it.
And there was a mainstream article in the Deutsche Newspaper, I can't recall the name
now, Tageszeitung, I didn't pronounce it well.
But that was the newspaper, and I have to look at it to see what their take on the whole
thing was.
I'm really curious.
Well, I thought what was interesting was some of the policemen's take on it was basically
supportive.
When I was explaining to them what these devices were doing, they said, yeah, that's a good
idea.
I'd like to have one of these.
And I was just wondering, would you get that kind of a reaction from a cop in New York
if you got detained for turning off an 80,000-euro TV, which apparently can't be turned back
on again?
Yeah, I talked to the person who was arrested and the two people who were detained with
him, and all three of them were incredibly happy to have had this experience, which kind
of surprised me.
But yeah, they saw it as an opportunity to sort of spread the gospel of why hackers do
what we do.
And they were saying it was to check out the technology, to learn as much as they can,
to try to learn what they can about it, make the technology better, and therefore make
the world around them a better place.
And the cops sympathized much more with them and tended to be predisposed to dislike the
managers that media mocked, which is kind of interesting.
And they told me, the people who were detained and arrested, each independently told me that
they saw this sticker on one of their laptops.
Evidently, they sort of confiscate equipment as a matter of course, and then give it back.
This one person's laptop said something along the lines of, invasion of privacy does not
enhance democracy.
And the cop looked at that and looked at the guy and he said, I agree with that.
Nice, very nice.
Yeah, I just don't know too many police in San Francisco where I live who would go out
of their way to express their opinion, let alone one that they agree with me.
But yeah, I find that pretty interesting.
And also to side with, blatantly side with the person who their job is to arrest.
So kind of cool.
Mitch, unfortunately, we're out of time.
Was anybody there that you wanted to say a brief word about the radio station?
We only have about 30 seconds.
Oh yeah, the place is Micro FM.
And here is Johannes, who runs the show.
Why don't you say a couple of words about the station while we have a few seconds left.
Okay.
A few seconds left.
Hello.
Hi, this is Johannes.
Yeah, yeah.
Hi.
Okay, you're on radio now.
We only have about 30 seconds, but tell us very quickly how you got involved in this,
what the station's about.
What the station is about.
The station is about that we are claiming to have a free radio station also in Berlin.
And we are trying to make a kind of world trip in eight days to show what free radio can be.
And from all the continents and from all different sources.
That's the 22nd statement, I think.
Well, you're pretty good.
You're obviously a radio person.
I can sum it up that quickly.
We're sorry we couldn't talk more about this, but we definitely want to give the information out to
the people.
You can listen online.
Important is that you spell micro FM with a K.
That's important to understand our website, for instance.
If you visited, it's mainly in German.
And what's the address again?
I say micro FM is spelled with a K instead of a C.
What's the rest of the address?
It's micro.fm.
Okay, great.
Well, Johannes, good luck and thanks for talking to us.
Yeah, and thank you for joining us.
All right.
I'll visit you tomorrow.
Mike, I believe you have about another Johannes.
This Johannes from Austria who did one of the closing ceremonies at the CCC.
Yeah, he played for us actually twice during the conference because it was so popular.
This song.
The song is called Surf and Multimedia.
It's by a group called the Eurocats.
It's from 1996 when the internet was sort of just starting to enter into the public
consciousness.
We don't have a lot of time, but I should read you the translation at least of the chorus
because most of the song is actually just repetition of the chorus.
It's surfing, surfing through the world with multimedia, surfing, surfing day and night
on the information highway.
And the rest of the lyrics, maybe we'll post them to our website, are just as awesome.
And the song may even hackers sing and dance and do cartwheels and other stuff.
It's a lot of fun.
And there's sort of a cult of this song being started in Germany right now.
And maybe we can bring it here to the States.
Awesome.
Right to us.
OTH at 2600.com.
Let's go out with the Eurocats for Off The Hook.
Surfing, surfing through the world with multimedia, surfing, surfing day and night on the information
highway.
Come tonight to the internet, I'm already waiting for you.
Man, be a user, go online, send me an email.
Surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing, surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
Surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
And if you're missing a few megabytes, you can find them with me.
On Interface, on Cyberspace, I'm happy to share them with you.
Surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing, surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
Surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
With bits and bytes, with mouse and click, we go on tour.
The World Wide Web, we follow every hot trail today.
Surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
Surfing through the world with multimedia, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf, surf.
Surfing day and night on the information highway.
Ooh, hey, Cat, wow, that was great!
That's going to be a cult classic, I tell ya!
A cult classic.