What makes the situation more peculiar is that all of Varela's film work was confiscated by police and is now in their hands,
exposing Mapuche activists who trusted her.
Also confiscated was material she was preparing for a docudrama telling the story of a left-wing political organization
that took up arms during the Pinochet dictatorship.
Her arrest is scaring documentary filmmakers.
At a press conference, documentary filmmaker Ignacio Agüero expressed how they feel.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York where the time is 7 o'clock.
Time now for Off The Hook.
But if they could, they would.
But the best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Now, you see, he leaves this whole big proclamation afterwards which is longer than the message.
And there's a way to get rid of that. There's a way to cut that.
See? It's not done yet. They're still giving you instructions.
or press pound for whatever happens just the beat all right Bernie you know it's
it's time for off the hook and we don't know where you are so please call us on
the special secret hotline the the red one not the green one and we'll watch
out for that and hopefully we'll talk to you this hour okay disconnect you have
to send it and you send with urgent delivery thank you for calling good you
should let us say goodbye you know I had enough okay special guests this
evening Stephen Levy is joining us how you doing welcome thank you
Stephen is our keynote speaker for the last hope conference coming up in well
next week actually in about what nine days that's really soon yeah now you
guys listening might recall the name Stephen Levy he wrote the book hackers
heroes of the digital revolution computer of I always get that wrong I
know what year was that written 1984 Wow so the same year 2600 started coming
out the same year frack magazine started the same year the chaos communication
Congress began in Germany a lot of things happen in 1984 total syzygy yes
indeed have things changed over the years between how you saw hackers back
then and what hackers are viewed as now a lot has changed but I think what's
really encouraging to me is fundamentally hacker ism has actually
spread and it's in viral form it's really moved throughout the culture
pretty thoroughly and it's been a pretty encouraging thing if you recall from the
book in beginning with the last section I was getting a little pessimistic the
money and greed and the popularity of computers might help drive out hacker
ism and certainly the pure hacker ism that I wrote about in the MIT AI lab
changed from from stuff like that but you know the really good thing was that
first with personal computers and then the Internet the spirit of hacker ism got
out there and I think now after a really rough period the term hacker is being
reclaimed to be something more positive than just referring as it was starting
the mid 80s with people who did destructive things mm-hmm do you buy
into the whole thing of well let's refer to those kinds of people as crackers and
the others as hackers and everything will be fine you know you really can't
fight language language has a course of its own it's like trying to move a river
so when people found it convenient to refer to hackers in that sense and made
it a definition not the definition of hackers that that's locked in that
people are always going to use that but I think in a positive sense the earlier
more positive definition which you know just encompassed you know people who did
wizardry or did amazing things and were curious and tinkered with the world
that's coming back now so I don't know if it's going to overwhelm the
pejorative sense but certainly it's back with it with a force now I think you
could say I'm a hacker and people won't immediately feel oh my god are you gonna
ruin my computer what depends if you work for mass media I think that's the
impression that you you convey now as far as you mentioned that some of the
hackers spirit might be lost with the success of computers and I guess more
money coming in I think that's what happened with the dot-com era in the 90s
you think that affected hacking in a bad way no I don't think so because the
people who you know did that sort of destructive number on what a dot-com
meant back then in the 90s where the greed heads who weren't the hackers but
the people who jumped in and tried to get in there and run the companies back
in the back office the hackers were doing what they always did which was to
you know build the stuff and they never stopped yeah but they made obscene
amounts of money and sometimes that affects I guess your motivation and your
loyalty and things like that I saw a lot of people in the 90s just kind of change
from being altruistic to just sort of wanting more you know I'm wanting more
cars and houses and just money and of course all that fell apart and I for one
I was kind of I was kind of glad when it did well there was a nice karmic edge to
it wasn't there when some of those people and I think you know one one
really dramatic instance of that it was when some of the Linux companies you
know went public and for a while they have these unbelievable valuations you
know the source forage stuff in the end and those companies there and you had
people who stood for open software all of a sudden being you know through no
fault of their own multi-millionaires and you know someone really didn't know
how to handle it but things found their own level and now those people are you
know I guess back on the hustings for open source again. Yeah absolutely what
do you think of the whole open source movement? I think it's great and I think
if you really hang out at some of the big companies like Google or even Apple
you find that they rely on open source to you know keep their company going
there so I think it's so embedded in the system now that it really is here to
stay it's been an amazing sort of back office revolution that's happened with
open source. What got you involved from the from the beginning when you first
got involved in computers and then your interest in what hacking was all about
what motivated you? Well I was a an English major type of freelance writer
writing for different publications in the very early 80s and someone suggested
I do a story on computer hackers. This is 1981. I'd never touched a computer before
and at that time the definition of hacker really didn't go to something
destructive or something great but more described the personality type a kind of
person that doesn't doesn't take a bath and just sits in front of computer and
can't talk to other people and you have these articles in psychology today with
people with flies buzzing around them and saying like like this is a hacker
you know what a weird person this is and not a person you'd want to hang out
with but when I went out to California to do the story I did it for Rolling
Stone I was just totally blown away by these people what really impressed me
first of all they weren't antisocial you got them talking they couldn't stop but
also the way they viewed the world amazed me because they saw the world as
a problem to be solved and they solved it in imaginative ways they had different
ways of looking at things and the interesting things they did in
programming to solve a problem they sometimes would apply to the world
around them and I thought it was a pretty interesting way to look at things
and I found them pretty creative so I decided I wanted to spend more time
writing about those people and it wound up I wound up writing a book about them
and in course of doing the book I think I found sort of shared values among
different generations of hackers that you can really tell there's a bedrock
set of values that any hacker has and I wrote that up in the book what are some
of those values well I called it a hacker ethic one of them the basic one
is information should be free and there's been a lot of talk about that
and Stuart Brand actually hacked that phrase to say information wants to be
free everyone says that I said this and I never said this information wants to
be free they say hey man you say information wants to be free and yet you
sell a magazine that makes no sense first of all I never said well you're a
hacker aren't you yeah you know information is free but magazines and
books you got to pay for those because if they're they're physical things there
I come out and that's you know that's as true as it gets but yeah information
wants to be free Stuart Brand said that right but in terms of the hackers that
their core belief was it really was had nothing to do with with laws or anything
like that they just wanted the information at that time information
about computers was hard to get and access to computers was hard to get not
everyone got it so they were desperate to find out everything they could
because they weren't going through the normal channels of doing it and you know
putting on their black shoes and working for IBM they were working outside it
because they wanted access to the energy of the computer which was tough
to get so information was very precious and once they had it they felt it should
be shared with someone else and when they wrote a program they felt boy
everyone should be able to see this program and work with it at MIT they put
the programs on paper tapes kept them in a drawer there was no proprietary nature
to the programs anyone could share it anyone could build on it and do
something great with it that's the way space war came about so that was the
basis of that and the other principles were things like we don't care who you
are just how you hack so no matter what color you were no matter what age you
were even what gender you were people just took your hacking for the
determination of whether you were a total bozo or someone worth paying
attention to. It brings back such good memories because yeah that's how it was
it was you know not a whole lot of egos going on no commercialization whatsoever
the net was in its infancy and yeah back then in the early 80s was people
didn't have access to computers like they do now when I got in trouble back
then it was because I was curious I wanted to see how this system worked I
wanted to communicate with people the coolest thing in the world you could
send electronic mail to somebody and they could get it without having to wait
for a busy signal to go away for hours sometimes on the same bulletin board
that you called you could actually send it to a different city they could call a
different number and that was something that most people had no conception of
yeah that was all built on collaboration and communication and the early bulletin
boards were total hacker enterprises there and yeah they would that was based
on those principles that get the information out when you get it share
it nothing's just standing your way and that's why hackers just hate bureaucracy
because bureaucracy really is about partitioning information keeping you
away from information creating a hierarchy that stood between you and
learning what things were about yeah I need to know and security through
obscurity and all that right right so authority really should not be respected
because that's to keep you away from the information and what one of the other
precepts of the hacker ethic and it's weird to say this now because you
wouldn't think it need to be stated but you can create art and beauty on a
computer now the time I wrote that that was a really foreign concept to a lot of
people they thought computers were just for numbers yeah all things yeah so the
fact that I even had to say that and you know can people would raise an eyebrow
really huh said something about those time I mean they weren't color screens
everything was either green or amber or something like that and in the graphics
that was you know graphics were unusual and that you was there a period where
you realize the potential what computers could do what what a network
could do and in those early days that's what kept me coming back right I they
the hackers I talked to and the people involved in the personal computer
revolution which really was something which had a big political component to
it opened my eyes to the potential there and you could see it you could see once
you understood Moore's Law how these things were going to get more and more
powerful and work their way into all our lives to be so important to everyone and
it happened it was one of those things you could see it happening and it
happened so forcefully that even the most optimistic assessments you could
have made back in the early 1980s turned out to be way short of the mark tell us
about Moore's Law Moore's Law is you know the estimation by Gordon Moore of
Intel about how quickly chips would improve so he figured out that every 18
months the power of chips the computation you could do on a microchip
would double and the price would go down by half does that still happen yes it is
and it's going to be locked in they've got the technical advances to lock it in
for another 15 years as a matter of fact I used to rip John Markoff who covers of
the chip things among other things in Silicon Valley that he had a template in
his computer to write a headline Moore's Law will be extended for five more years
as they always found something else to keep it going uh-huh Wow so okay let's
look at the future how much more can we possibly obtain through faster computing
technology and more access I mean we we're looking at everything from movies
to our entire music collection fast communication where else can this go
well what's happened now is that we're getting an extra push of something we
didn't have before which is ubiquity so the things that have excited a lot of
people in the last few years are things dealing with social networking and the
kinds of effects that come not only from massive computation and massive storage
the storage revolution I think has turned out to be just as significant in
a way as the revolution in computation driven by Moore's Law that runs even
faster than Moore's Law in how cheap and powerful storage is and now we get this
idea of when everyone's connected certain things can come of that that
didn't happen before so things move faster and faster and faster and I think
massive connectivity pervasive connectivity is the thing that's going
to push amazing things over the next few years what was your first computer I got
well immediately upon returning from California after doing that story you
know back then people were deciding gee should I get an electronic typewriter
and you know replace my electronic computer this thing's like there's one
line and you could don't even have to finish typing the line you can correct
the thing like that I immediately came back and said to my girlfriend who's now
my wife let's let's let's do it we bought two Apple computers and the bill
for the Apple computers to share one printer dot matrix printer was ninety
five hundred dollars oh my god Wow do you still have it yes I do
well good for you I haven't fired it up lately Wow but I wrote hackers you know
this tells us something about storage is that some chapters were too long to hold
on one floppy disk literally I tried to get one chapter on every floppy disk but
some of them I had to split against two Wow was he's hard sectored or soft
sectored Oh soft yeah amazing just the history of where this is gone in the
last I guess 25 years or so it's really where it all happened it's it's it's
incredible and do you think you think enough people have access now do you
think it's easy to get on the net for people to get access to technology
easier say than it was back in the 80s it really is but our demands are higher
I think what this is one you know thing which is just getting me increasingly
pissed off is how this country you know can mainly its government policy which
is the culprit and you know the people who aren't doing we need to do that
we're far behind where we should be in bringing these things out to the people
there I think pretty much everyone can get hold of a computer and we've
actually done pretty well in getting computers in libraries but in big parts
of the country we don't have broadband the rest of us pay way too much for way
too little broadband and I think this is something that holds us back both
creatively and business sense I don't if you saw the story that came out this
week but according to the Associated Press a new study suggests that attitude
rather than availability may be the key reason why more Americans don't have
high-speed internet access only 14% of dial-up users say they're stuck with the
older slower connection technology because they can't get broadband in our
neighborhoods 35% said they're still on dial-up because broadband prices are too
high while another 19% said nothing would persuade them to upgrade so a lot
of people seem to be saying no thanks to broadband Internet what do you make
yeah well I saw that studies by the Pew it's a Pew study they've been they
they're pretty good at studying the Internet and if you look down there you
find that it's the lower income people that are actually going backwards they
are giving up broadband where you know you would assume that well once they got
it they should keep going but it just costs too much and and I think that that
is a huge problem it costs too much for everybody but particularly if you don't
have much money if you're a you know family trying to struggle to do all the
things you have to do on a low income 40 bucks a month for broadband right of
course now do you think there's other parts of the world that are doing it
properly oh definitely you go to Korea or Japan they are getting you know like
hundred megabits a second for 20 bucks a month or something mm-hmm and they're
getting it on their wristwatches and everything everywhere everywhere you
know wireless the wireless penetration you know it's pervasive and the
government instead of saying oh yeah yeah well you know we've got to do
better is actually trying to defend what it has you know the way they measure
broadband is that they consider a zip code to be equipped with broadband if
one place in the entire zip code gets it and you know usually it does because we
spend a lot of money and there's been foundations doing this to get make sure
the library in town gets located so I spend you know some of my summers up in
a place in Western Massachusetts 150 miles from New York City you know big
cultural area but you know the cross-state from Boston no broadband I
have to on a Sunday I have to schlep my computer to a food court in a shopping
mall in order to get connected in broadband and download a tune so we're
talking with Steven Levy keynote speaker for the last hope conference coming up
next week and author extraordinaire you're writing for wired now yes I am
after 12 years of Newsweek I've gone over to wired that I've been affiliated
with actually since it started I wrote the second cover story on cypherpunks I
think I remember that I remember the first great picture of the people with
their hashes of the you know the PGP hash on their foreheads remember that
yeah so I finally uh you know joined up with wired wired has done pretty well
over 15 years it's 15 years old now and now I'll be there full-time they're
going to do a front of the book column sort of product oriented but trying to
figure out the psychology of products and different things and and then write
long stories about stuff I hope is interesting you've got a book coming out
or should we not know I'm working on a book I my most recent book is about was
about the iPod the perfect thing and the book I've started now but it's a ways
from being finished is about Google I'm trying to get inside Google as much as
possible and to write a book about what it's like inside Google do they like
people going inside them and asking questions not random people walking off
the street but I've been writing about Google for quite a while and I was able
to convince the brain trust their Larry Sergey Eric then it would be a good idea
to have me come in there and learn about them and you know they signed off on it
so I hope I'm not going to gain even more weight from Google cafeterias over
the next year but tell us some of the stories about the Google cafeterias I
hear rumors I hear all sorts of things I think 17 now on campus 17 different
cafeterias yes that's and of course it's all free all free and they are it the
big one is called Charlie's and that's named after the chef who was the
original Google chef who was affiliated with the Grateful Dead the story was
that some people think that he was the chef for the Grateful Dead but I think
it just came up they sometimes he cooked for the Grateful Dead he didn't travel
with them I never knew the Grateful Dead had a chef that's kind of an
interesting yeah well they they travel as a family and they had one so uh but
it wasn't Charlie so then Charlie you know that's a that's a huge cafe with
everything and then there's other ones that people have their favorites one of
the one of the building where a lot of the top executives are it's called no
name and it's really easy to just zip in there and get some you know good healthy
foods or a sandwich but I've been getting in some of the more exotic ones
my most interesting one so far is they have a tapas cafe do they yes tapas
there's another one called Oasis which specializes in pizza and sort of
hardcore oriental food and if you you know look at that it's very big
contingent of some of the Asian people who work for Google you know eat there
and there's one which is based on a Mexican restaurant in town that Sergei
used to eat there when he was a graduate student and he convinced them
to operate a franchise at Google the only difference being it there's no cash
register Wow interesting so your hands don't get
dirty dealing with money I heard though there's a bit of a controversy over at
Google concerning daycare apparently they're cutting a daycare program that
people like and replacing it with some other program that people aren't that
crazy about and that is not free they have to pay for that right you know you
have to pay for the daycare it's kind of interesting these things get aired out
in these Friday sessions called TGIF and every Friday you know it's usually
Sergei and Larry sometimes Eric get up there and they take questions from any
Googler and they do it in Charlie's of course and that the place is packed and
people watch remote locations watch it from high-definition screens and
sometimes people ask really hostile questions this daycare thing was you
know really acrimonious and they're out there and I don't think it was
necessarily a case of Google trying to screw the employees they just felt boy
we should do something really amazing with daycare and you know in this case
they adopted something which wound up costing so much that they really
couldn't support it on a massive scale there what happens is that they want to
rethink every aspect of business and sometimes they screw up because they're
trying zillions of different things so sometimes things are really successful
it's sort of counterintuitive to think if we give away free food it'll be a big
win for us but I think it's a huge win not so much because people get fat
there but because they encourage people to come and sit at tables with people in
different parts of the company so by doing that they'll learn people learn
about different things what's going on the company they'll make connections to
help people you know make partnerships and come up with different things and
they're pretty happy with the way that's worked out I'm actually interviewing
people I found quite a lot of people who say you know I wound up hearing about
this while sitting at lunch one day and they got ideas for projects which were
good for Google. Have you ever seen a company like Google before with these
kinds of I don't know high ideals I suppose? Well there's been a lot of
companies with it started thinking we could do it differently but Google
really tries to do things differently in every aspect and what's enabled them
to do it when other companies haven't is they've got this amazing money machine
which puts you know which which makes failure in any given aspect not so
terrible because they try something it doesn't work it doesn't matter because
the ads are bringing in the money and keeping the whole enterprise going so
they could afford to take risks they could afford to to take very long bets
they could afford to start a project and not worry immediately my god how are we
going to make a profit on this for instance there's no ads on Google News
to this day. Yeah and and the main Google page for the most part looks pretty
sparse right there too many other places so does your Google book have a title
yet? Not really. Okay. I'll take suggestions. All right and when you think it'll be out
another year perhaps or? Probably you know the earliest be like the end of
next year. Cool that sounds like a fascinating subject. We're talking with
Steven Levy. Bernie S is joining us now from Philadelphia I believe. I know I'm
from still in the the nether regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania. I see hence
the difficulty reaching you before. Well Bernie I'd like to introduce you to
Steven Levy our keynote speaker. Hello Steven looking forward to meeting you at
the actually I've met you before at the Trenton Computer Festival years ago.
Okay. But be good to hear you speak looking forward to your to your keynote
speech at the HOPE conference. Well good well best to you and the picturesque
Poconos. Yes I was wondering if anybody here has any questions for Steven? We
have about 50 people in the studio so anybody have anything they like to ask
about the past, the present, the future of computers? Lex looks like you have
something. I'm kind of wondering what you're expecting from the HOPE
conference. Well I've actually been I'm not sure one or two but I have been to
the HOPE conference and I'm expecting you know a lot of you know people in
t-shirts who are interested in my subject. I mean these are my people. I
I love just love hanging out with hackers because as I said before the way
they see the world just is I think it's fascinating and something that everyone
could learn from and something that over the years I put a lot of effort into
hoping to chronicle in a decent way. People often ask me boy are you ever
going to do a sequel to hackers but to me I've written like five sequels to
hackers because pretty much everything I write is built on the things that come
out of the creativity that hackers do. I should point out that Steven wrote the
book called hackers but he had nothing to do with the movie called hackers. No.
What do you think of that by the way? Well you know I guess it was in giving
Angelina Jolie to the world you know it has some benefit there. I wish they
hadn't used my title. It was so cool hanging out with her back then when she was just she was so
young and shy and just hanging out in the streets in the West Village. But the lips were big even then
weren't they? Yeah they were. So she could you know she was really nice. She
could pull that movie out. She didn't think she was a good actress. That was
the funny thing. She was like so hesitant to even star in another movie. I told her
you know what you just got to reach for the sky and keep going and she said you
know I'm gonna do it. That's good. You're welcome. You're welcome Angelina. I know
the two of you are so close. It's beautiful. No she actually came to a 2600 meeting in
Rollerblades. Yeah that was that was a sight. I think she got kicked out of the
building because they don't allow that in Citigroup. Rob you have a question? I
was wondering what you think of speaking of the HOPE conference what you think of
the evolution of hacker culture where we've gotten to the point from you know
those basements in the 60s and 70s to today when we can have something as huge
and as public as as HOPE. Well again really really encouraging and you know
it's it's great to see those things spring up and I watch the evolution of
conferences like that. It sprung up in the you know the odd relationship with
you know you even you know there's there's a jargon for it the white hats
the black hats the you know there's always some cool believe it or not law
enforcement people who you know who get it and you know hang out without being
judgmental about it and you know don't try to stop the the main flow of the
activity there. Although one of our panelists did get arrested last time.
Well actually as a private investigator Steve Rombaum got arrested by the
federal authorities and he's giving a three-hour talk this year so that should
be interesting. All charges of course. He got arrested for? The Feds took
exception to something that he was doing they accused him of interfering with
something they were doing and it turns out that that apparently had no merit
and they dropped all charges and never pursued it. So he'll be talking about
that at the conference as well he's giving a three-hour talk on Saturday
night and you're talking Saturday afternoon. Right not for three hours. Not
for three hours unless you want to but the whole schedule then will be behind
by three hours. I just came from I was in Cuba earlier this month so I think but I
didn't hear one of those Fidel speeches. Hang on hang on you were in Cuba let's
hear about this because Mike and I traveled to Cuba a couple years ago we've
been talking about it on the air and getting all kinds of mail from listeners
about how to travel to Cuba but we went as journalists. Did you go legally? I did
go legally and I didn't I didn't go as a journalist because I it was sort of a
family vacation and but I went as a family visit. Actually my wife has a
relative who works for the State Department in our interest section it's
called of you know the you know in Cuba. We have a building there you know and
with all these flags surrounding. Exactly yeah yeah there's this amazing story
there's the U.S. you know in the building they try to do with a news
ticker. Yes. You have uncensored news to the Cuban people and Cuba put up these
flags like 83 flags I think one for each person who died in some plane crash that
you know you know there was some you know doubt about why the plane went down.
Right. And so they did to block the thing and the other thing is that in the
office of the consul the equivalent of the consul's non-official consul our
building overlooks the Malecon which is the really beautiful you know walkway by
by you know the water there. Right. By the Gulf and to block the view they put up
these two big propaganda billboards so every day the you know the guy who looks
out his window instead of seeing the beautiful Gulf of Mexico has to see
these you know billboards you know proclaiming the revolution. Uh-huh.
Nice man. Now Kevin. Jump back to the question of the hack revolution where do
you see hackers going next? What's the next step? I think what happens is that
more and more hacker-ism gets into the culture there. I think you know for
hackers really that things are unlimited because as things get more and more
connected the opportunities in all directions good and bad you know just
multiply there. So I think in some senses there's you know scary consequences that
can come. If you really think about the power that people in potential potentially
could have to shut things down and how things aren't shut down it really says a
lot for a lot of people who at one point might have thought you know it might
cross their mind hey it would be interesting to shut things down but you
know I think there's a general sense of responsibility among you know the
overall hacker community which keeps things going. Well the thing that bothers
me is that every time something does go wrong every time say some entity loses
10,000 bits of personal data credit card numbers social security numbers things
like that even though it's their incompetence and and lack of security
that led to losing this information somehow hackers get blamed because they
say that hackers can now get a hold of this information because it was lost.
And it's it's amazing how they are blamed for something that they had no
connection to at all just theoretically and to this day I think their their their
name is maligned unfairly because of things like this. Yeah but what I guess
that comes from the definition so you say someone working in Bulgaria who's
basically just engaged in straight criminal activities right not really
interested in doing innovative things with it with a computer at all but maybe
even gets hold of some scripts and you know doesn't even do the the coding you
know by himself and winds up stealing a lot of things you know just trafficking
and in credit cards you know I guess by one definition you would call that
person or that person could be called a hacker but certainly not by the
definition that I grew up with and you know to me it's disappointing that
things have taken the direction that there there are genuinely people who do
that kind of crap and it really is unfortunate because there was a time
when that was extremely rare when people who had the technical expertise would
never do that kind of thing it would be very rare for someone to engage in dark
side activities straightforward for money there used to be there was a time
where it always be some sort of technical wizardry which would be the
main factor. There's no connection at all to hacking there because maybe maybe
they're using technology in some way that a hacker was able to figure out but
as you say they're not interested at all in that they're just interested in
making money or causing destruction or something and yeah you might be using
hacker abilities that have already been defined for you but that doesn't make
you a hacker. Right well again who owns the definition of the word so I think we
could both agree that those people aren't hackers in the sense that we
think of hackers but some people can talk about them and say oh hackers in
you know in Estonia or Russia or China or whatever stole these credit card
numbers and it would have a value of communication for two people talking to
say that and really you can't stop that. I mean it just bothers me that whenever
something goes wrong security wise identity theft or something like that
the default demon is always hackers not not criminals not corporate executives
who don't care and don't protect the information in the first place but if
this information is lost hackers are the ones that are going to get hold of it
and in fact the opposite I think is true where hackers are the ones that are
safeguarding information teaching people about encryption teaching people how to
retain their information and not give out certain vital bits to people have no
right to it in the first place. For instance you don't have to give your
social security number to the phone companies you can give them any number
and as long as you match that number in the future that'll be fine that's one
bit of information they don't have then. Right well we did a cover story on
identity theft a couple years ago in Newsweek and what really struck me was
how much the companies who store your information were responsible for that
and a simple change in the laws to make them responsible when you know there's
an incursion when they lose a laptop with everyone's personal information on
it or you know when a criminal somewhere does get hold of these numbers you know
quite often it's actually someone inside who just steals the numbers yes and you
know and then passes them on again no hacking involved but to make them
responsible for it somehow I bet they would tighten up their procedures and
you would see a lot fewer problems like that. Well Bernie I know this is one of
your pet peeves that the people aren't ever held responsible for this kind of
thing. No there's just really little or no accountability by the individuals at
the companies who are ultimately responsible for the leaking of our
private information en masse and other countries have really strict privacy
laws against this and companies individuals really have to have to pay
and be held accountable for it but not the United States because in our country
the information industry credit bureaus that sort of thing clearinghouses they
have such a strong lobbying arm in Washington that money talks so they get
laws crafted in their favor. Do you think we have less privacy now than we had 20
years ago? Oh definitely definitely and you know I think Scott McNeely was a
person who said your privacy is lost get over it and you know there was a lot of
he took a lot of heat for that but I think it generally you know it's pretty
tough to maintain your privacy now that's one of the the dark sides of
having everything easily searchable and you know what we have now even though we
have legal encryption people don't use it. Right why is that? It's not built in
well in order for it to be effective it really would have to be built into
everything we do it would have to be the default. Right. That you know you
wouldn't be turning on encryption it should be on and you for some reason if
you didn't want it you should turn it off but we don't have that. It seems like
people using PGP it seems like there's been also time trying to figure out how
to make sure that they're handshaking properly between versions and exchanging
the right keys and by the time they actually get around to sending a message
about four or five unencrypted emails have gone back and forth trying to get
it to work properly. That's right yeah so it's the stuff's way way too hard to
use and there have been programs like Lotus Notes for instance which had
built-in encryption and the guy who did notes is a guy Ray Ozzie who later did a
program called Groove which is a collaboration program with strong
encryption again built in no one even knew what it was there but if you ever
tried to intercept something you know or break into one of those sessions you
would find it pretty hard to get into there being a really government level
and encryption just rolling on that thing so there have been times where
software's has had it really effective but right now I send the message to you
on exchange or you know really any email system that's not automatically
encrypted. Why is that? Exactly it wouldn't be very difficult to do this
but again I guess we are at war and we have to protect our nation and our
government has to read everything we say and listen to all our phone calls. Well
then people can listen to what we say or and find out stuff about us you know or
even if we're talking about things which could be of value to people who would do
harm that's open to. Absolutely now there's also the many instances of
people voluntarily giving out information they don't need to give out
social networking sites for instance what do you make of the explosion and
popularity of things like Facebook and MySpace? Well it's interesting how much
is a generational thing that younger people don't feel it's so important to
be all that private and you know sometimes you know people of you know
from the old generation baby boomers are appalled at that but you know it'll be
interesting to see. I think the test will be 30 years from now when you know
nominate some woman for the Supreme Court whether you know it's going to
make a difference that people have pictures of her you know the drinking
and token from some Facebook you know file you know in you know 2006. But I
mean that's that's nothing compared to some of the information people post on
these things they post all kinds every intimate thought and detail they post
their entire class schedules their home address pictures of their dog and their
family where they went on vacation inside of two minutes you could be
sitting in a Starbucks looking at some guy's playable shareable iTunes library
and inside of a couple minutes you've got his entire life story and he's not
even aware that you're there. I love the idea of looking at the iTunes library to
me the the one thing I want to see on iPods and I was amazed Microsoft didn't
do this on the Zune which is connected wirelessly is that the chance to see
everyone's music library I think that that could be great I'd love to be in
the subway and you know look around and say oh my god who was it listening to
who's got the Kenny G yeah exactly stamp out that person but you know here's a
Shelby Lin fan that's pretty cool. I think what's more interesting also is
how there's more and more detail to these kind of these feeds about people
so you know maybe it started with Facebook that someone would have a
status what I'm up to now and then you move down to things like Twitter where
somebody's sending you know every hour or a couple times a day you know by a
text message or by going online what they're doing so you could get a look at
someone's page and you know know what they've been up to over the past week if
you really wanted to and so it's like that you know Facebook and MySpace all
that kind of gave you a broad overview now you're getting this more fine-grained
more detailed look into what somebody's life mm-hmm and not only people it's
hugely popular it is Obama Twitter's right and so does the Mars Lander that's
a Twitter feed coming from the Mars Lander tell you I had a great Twitter
moment you know it's sort of a modest but I one of my Twitter you know things
I follow was called Twitter lit you ever hear of this Twitter lit Twitter lit
it's just like every hour they send you the first line of a book oh wow and one
day I was on Twitter and it sent me the first line of one of my books it was for
the first line of crypto wow I should point out that at the conference we're
gonna have Steve's book hackers crypto not crypto not crypto all right well
we're gonna have yeah we'll talk to them about that we're gonna find books and
and Steven will be signing them and this will be after his talk on Saturday and
it's gonna be it's gonna be a fun time for all so you know what I'm gonna do
there actually as a I have to figure out a way to do this I'm gonna bring a
copy of the original hackers the hardback book which is very very hard to
find and you know somehow we'll figure out how one lucky person I hope the
person didn't consider him or herself lucky we get a copy of that okay you
know I've reached into my secret stash of you know hardback books and someone
can get one and it's got a lot of mistakes in it that I corrected later
on is it a galley copy no no no original hardback all right and pretty
good condition there you know of you know of hackers hasn't been in hardback
since 1984 we sold out pretty quickly I didn't print a whole lot yeah but it's
sold out they did a very small second printing and and that was it from then
on you know pretty much everyone who's read hackers as read it in paperback but
I'll bring a hardback awesome looking forward to that speaking of books we
just got today the first copies of the best of 2600 book and just to give you
a sense as to how big this thing is I'm going to drop it on the floor now you're
gonna hear for yourself what this sounds like me make sure the microphone is up
this is the sound of the best of 2600 hitting the floor at about four feet
above the ground that's pretty heavy look at that I turned the computer on
doing that it's um it's not it's not as heavy as it looks well it's let me let
me also open up to the middle and then slam the book shut and then you'll you'll
get a sense as to how thick it is as well ready see that's that's thick that's
made you jump I can visually describe it if you'd like it basically looks like a
math I could throw it at you if you imagine you know a college textbook
mm-hmm that's about what you're looking at well and probably the same way
Schneier's I didn't say it was I had the content of a textbook I said that's
about not although you could learn quite a bit from this applied cryptography by
Bruce Schneier which came out many years ago is pretty thick it's about as
thick as this and we just got our first copies they don't send you galley copies
anymore galley copies come through PDF so you don't actually get to have those
anymore I was looking forward to having galley copies of this to give to my
friends but now you just get the final the final product this is going to be
available at hope as well we doing book signings for the best of 2600 900 pages
900 pages of all kinds of history and a lot of what Stephen is talking about
tonight is reflected in here as well the early days of hacking networks like
telenet and time net and things like that and just sort of the sense as to
the potential of what computers can do 300 baud 1200 connecting to bulletin
boards sharing information connecting to all these international networks and
meeting people it was all there in its infancy we divided it into three
sections the 80s and 90s and whatever you call this period of time and you see
the changes but you also see the the thread the similarity and that that
similarity is just the hacker ethic that's sort of maintained throughout and
it's still I think as as you believe exists as strongly as it existed back in
the 80s just the toys have changed quite a bit yeah and I think you know really
that the thing which kept it going is the internet and the internet was built
by people who had that mentality they built it the openness is just baked into
its DNA and that's why so hard to secure but it spread the whole thing
throughout and you know it's built open source principles and I think you know
it's out in the world you can't put it back let's see if we can fit in a
few phone calls right two one two two zero nine two nine hundred we've got
Stephen Levy here keynote speaker for the last hope and author of a bunch of
really interesting pieces and books over the years and I'd say you're pretty much
an expert on the whole hacker culture you've defined much of it you want the
book Red Hat I'm gonna hand it to you don't drop it okay it's very heavy
the one thing we haven't done with it is hit not Kevin over the head with it
don't do that it's just too dangerous it's too dangerous don't know because
this book is a weapon in many ways that's how serious this book is it's too
dangerous a weapon of knowledge but it's also a physical weapon because 900 pages
is nothing to be sneezed at Emmanuel yes go ahead Bernie will there be some sort
of a formal unveiling of this this tome I don't know how formal is going to be
but I do know we will have book signings on I think Friday where we'll have books
on a evening I think we said and it's going to be available throughout the
the conference and you'll be able to find it in find bookstores but also the
crappy ones as well I understand they signed on for this there's a special
URL if you go to amazon.com slash 2600 it just comes right up there you go like
by magic yeah it's it hasn't been released to the public yet but it will
be within days all right that's on pre-order on Amazon it is it is two one
two two zero nine two nine hundred let's see if we can fit in a few phone calls
we got Stephen Levy on the on the in the studio rather and let's see who's out
there and good evening you're on off the hook yes speak up please
thank you first time I'm hearing it turn on your radio please Sam because you're
going to get yeah I am hearing the show for the first time I'm really amazed
that this is out there I didn't know it was available on radio and I'm really
enjoying mr. Levy's talk I started working in computers way back in the 80s
and just to hear someone talk about the changes it really is a long journey
about 25 years and I had a question for mr. Levy if he's can take questions
sure what do you think that governments have failed in the sense that they've
not been able to share the information that the way the hackers believed
information was free why governments are not able to work together to create a
open Internet well governments by and large you know it's very rare to see a
government committed to openness in the u.s. they passed a law about free call
Freedom of Information Act just think about that the Freedom of Information
Act it sounds great and if they followed it it would have been great but when I
wrote my book crypto I asked for some stuff and then the Freedom Information
Act and some of it finally came like a year after I finished the book but it
came yeah governments do not warm leaders you know politicians do not warm
to openness they thrive when things are closed and that's why the citizenry has
to push very hard and technology can be a huge help in this and you know forcing
them especially in a company like the country like the u.s. and so that it's
built on the principles that the people are the government that the people have
to keep pushing the government because people who run things don't like things
open they can get away with more if things aren't open that seems to be a
prevailing trade amongst governments like you say that freedom of information
tends to be the enemy and not just governments corporations and nasty
people all kinds of entities out there all right thank you like take another
take my phone call two one two two zero nine two nine hundred and good evening
you're on off the hook yes go ahead speak up you're on the air you can get
tickets to the conference at the door starting I think Thursday night at the
Hotel Pennsylvania not this Thursday week from Thursday but the tickets are
for the weekend so that even if you come at the last possible minute on Sunday
it's still the same price for the entire weekend so we suggest people come
as early as possible and you know you can if that's a problem you can always
have one person come one day another person come the other day you can you
can give you take it to somebody else we don't have any restrictions as far as
that goes it's not something we tie to your arm that you can't take off but
yeah for simplicity's sake we we do have one price yeah I know you're holding up
your armband from one of the other conferences not I can't take it off well
I have two of them on my arm and this is from the German the German camp and the
German Congress what they do is they tie it around your arm and you wear it for
the rest of your life forever but you know you can't give it to somebody else
when you do it that way but we we hand you well we have these really neat
badges and we blinky light blinky light well I have them I have a couple you
want me to take them out of my bag yeah all right hold on let's they're in here
hold it up I think that's them that's either that's either them or it's a
sandwich so be careful all right I'm gonna take another phone call while
you're opening the bag I nodded it so that it wouldn't fall out good evening
you're on off the hook hi hi what's on your mind hi I have a question for the
show about the about the digital TV converters okay we're not really talking
about that but go ahead make it quick okay I wanted to know what do you think
of it I had I bought a digital TV converter and my experience was that if
I have a good signal it's perfect but that if a plane flies over the picture
pixelates it hangs you within my box or is digital TV very I think lexicon has
an answer for you Mike if you make any more noise with that bag we really
appreciate you thank you so much go to Radio Shack and picks up pick up some
shielded cables because your cables are probably just have a thin wrapper around
there you go get better cables that's usually the solution okay what do you
got there Mike I have some badges all right I don't know how to make them I
have to take them out of the package exactly come on they're still wrapped up
but they're very nicely wrapped and they have all these weird components on them
that I understand can be used to track people yeah so basically if you're
pre-registered you're virtually guaranteed to have one of these if you
want them you don't have to get them you have all kinds of other badges that
don't have the tracking capabilities but it's gonna make for a really cool
experience Lexicon you want to briefly give us an example of what kinds of
things we'll be able to do yeah we have a system the the badges are part of the
German CCC's open beacon system which is an it's an RFID system and then we've
attached to that a system to take information about people what they're
interested in how old they are that sort of thing and we can compare all that
information and actually get people to connect with people that have the same
interests and like if you see some person who has 90% compatibility with
your interests you can ask the system to send them your email or your phone
number during the conference so you can connect and talk to them about those
interests you also find people who are diametrically opposed to everything you
stand for probably I find that more we're still programming so we can
actually put that in okay well you guys have been doing an amazing job as far as
getting all this together and it's just one of many things going on at the
conference that we're looking forward to okay I don't think we really have time
for any more phone calls but Stephen I want to give you an opportunity to give
any last words or websites or contact information that you'd like to share
with people well I guess uh if you want to get in contact with me they'll just
go to my website which is stephenlevy.com easy to find and there's a
contact thing there they could find out other stuff I've been up to and the
story about how I found Einstein's brain probably a story usually I'll tell at
the at the at hope they found Einstein's brain huh yeah yeah yeah I think I'd be
interesting to hear that. Einstein didn't mind? At that point he didn't put up any
objections. Wow okay well that's it's gonna be quite a story again Stephen
Levy keynote speaker for the last hope conference beginning on July 18th
running through the 19th and all the way into the 20th at the Hotel
Pennsylvania which is on 7th Avenue here in New York City more information
www.hope.net anyone have any other URLs or addresses they want to give out in
the last seconds of the show? telefreak.org telefreak.org well you guys
are going to have some presentation at the people can email us at
oth at 2600.com and we have like hundreds hundred talks more than a
hundred talks if you count the the unscheduled talks and something like
150 to 200 different speakers so yeah it's gonna be something else and we have
one more show before it all begins okay we're going to continue our tradition
that we started last week of playing music or pieces I have to do with
telephones this actually isn't a song per se but it's more like a spoken word
piece by Pimp Daddy Supremes it's called pick up the phone we'll see you
next week
in as little as five minutes you can call 1-800
call 1-800 that's 1-800 1-800 1-800 call 1-800 1-800
and in as little as 30 minutes you can be equal with God okay let's do it let's
check back in on the phone lines now and once more here's Lisa hi folks I can't
believe it either
these people behind me are so busy right now answering the telephone from people
just like you that are picking up the telephone and calling I know I've been
saying that a lot but I'm telling you the truth here folks anyone can do it
doesn't matter how young you are or how old you are just a few simple questions
you have questions you know all the answers I have the answers you better be
on the phone lines right now and you better be taking care of this as quickly
as you can
don't make me take you to church young man you don't have to go into the details
about all those things you thought were problems because it's no problem with
us the problem of course is that you haven't picked up the telephone and
called us yet they've got to get through right now go ahead
nudge your neighbor pick up the telephone and go hey what's up look at
this lady on TV is she for real she's for real I'm telling you well you know
what you can do with your stupid opinions you loudmouth drunk I'm sorry
but I need to let people know toll free numbers on your screen now the ball's in
your court it's up to you but what you have to do is pick up the phone and call
us go ahead pick up that telephone and call us here's your chance to do
something about it back to you guys ok thanks a lot I can't believe how busy
you guys are back there now Jim tell everyone again why they're so busy you
picked a fine time to leave me blue seal that's wrong that's not that's not it
okay all right well I thought even don't even suggest that ever again
Bob they're just asking a few basic questions and then they're on to the
next call it's just that easy oh talk about it pretty amazing Chris tell them
again just how easy it is it couldn't be easier all they have to do is get out of
the chair and call the 800 number so tell us how it feels it feels great it's
very invigorating it certainly is well there you have it folks get up and make
that call right now
okay let's see the number to dial is what is it two one two two zero nine ha
ha not really there was some sort of spoof by the 2600 hey did you guys out
there see that book that they have a 2600 it's really thick oh don't do that
my toe is there hey you guys get ready for the PC show coming up and by the way
how about those Mets and Yankees right yeah Hank's got his thumbs up and you
know I think I'm again I'm glad that Hillary stayed in you know she ran
across the finish line she didn't wait for people to stop her you know that's
the right thing to do okay yeah this is WBAI by the way and let's get on with
the show