Today's newscast was produced by Katherine Komp and Vinod K. Joes.
Our headlines editors are Nell Abram and Jess Burns.
Washington, D.C. editor is Leanne Caldwell.
Our technical production team at KPFA and Berkeley includes
Puglo, Rose Katopshi and Oscar Hernandez.
In Oaxaca, Mexico, I'm Shannon Young, sitting in for Aura Bogado.
And you're listening to Radio Station W, BAI, New York,
where the time is just about, well, just about 7 o'clock.
7 to 1, actually, which means the theme has already started.
You're listening to Off the Hook.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bon dilly bon for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bon dilly bon!
Now that's a maverick.
Yes, a maverick indeed.
We're just playing with the latest video games to come out here at Off the Hook.
And this is Off the Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined this week by Voltaire.
Good evening.
And Ralph T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Other side of the room, we have NotKevin.
Hello.
And down in Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Philadelphia, we have Bernie S.
Uh-oh, what happened to him?
Bernie, are you there?
Wake up. Earth to Bernie.
I pressed the button, see, it's pressed.
I don't hear him.
It's so pressed.
Yeah.
All right, Bernie, one last chance.
I'm going to have to call you back if we don't hear anything from you.
Okay.
Our special guest in the studio is Tiffany Radd.
Hi.
Tiffany, you gave a talk at the Hope Conference recently.
Yes, I did.
Tell us something about that.
I talked about RFID and the implications, legal and some technical aspects of RFID.
I'm a professor at University of Southern Maine and have a background in law and computer science.
Great.
So what kind of response did you get from the talk?
Well, I got a mixed response.
Right after the talk, this guy came up to me and asked if I could remove an RFID chip from his head.
And he claimed the government put one in while he was sleeping and he wanted my help.
But I got a lot of e-mails from people saying, hey, I have a passport.
I think it has RFID in it.
What do I do about it?
So, yeah, it was fantastic.
I had a great time presenting.
Did you, in fact, remove the chip from his head or you leave him stuck with it?
I told security at Hope about him.
I have not heard from him since, and I hope I do not.
All right.
Bernie rejoins us on the phone.
What happened to you, Bernie?
Oh, another spring PCS snafu.
What, they just can't keep a phone call connected?
I guess that's it.
Sorry about that.
All right.
Well, it's been an exciting week, as always, as we draw closer to Election Day.
And I think that's what we're going to be talking about more frequently are things that are going on as far as polls, polling machines, polling places, voter fraud, hacking of the election, that kind of thing.
A lot of people are assuming that there are going to be all kinds of hijinks and shenanigans going on.
Bernie, are you aware of anything that we have to be aware of in particular?
Well, in particular, just about any of the electronic voting machines has vulnerabilities that make them not terribly difficult to be tampered with.
I'm sorry.
That was our future vice president speaking there.
I hope not.
We have a Sarah Palin plug-in here that just keeps spouting forth with various comments.
I'm a maverick.
Yeah, things like that.
It's actually, I should tell people, it's a website, palinaspresident.us.
It's a lot of fun.
We've just been playing with it all day here, not getting any work done.
But the thing is, what I have to tell people, yeah, OK, sometimes the phone rings.
And if you don't pick up the phone because we do that.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
The world blows up.
So be careful playing that game.
Well, it's fun.
I know.
It's political.
But what's wrong with that?
It's political times.
We live in interesting times.
One thing I was very surprised at was looking at various websites that give surveys about how people vote in different states.
And it turns out that New York State is the only state with mechanical voting machines.
I thought other states had this.
And this also explains why.
Have you seen the latest cover of 2600 magazine, the Hacker Quarterly?
That's a picture of a mechanical voting machine.
A lot of people don't know what it is.
And I was wondering, why don't people know what this is?
Now I realize it's because only people in New York have ever seen these things.
Or maybe people have seen these things in the past but not recently.
Bernie, did you know that New York was the only state that had these left?
No.
Apparently, they didn't take the federal funding.
I think there was sort of a bribe that the federal government offered all the states saying, well, if you accept all this money, you're promised to buy electronic voting machines.
And I think virtually every state took the money and then had to buy and get rid of their mechanical machines.
So I wonder why New York didn't do that.
I think New York is kind of in the process of changing their voting machines.
But the government is so haphazardous that the Senate and the Congress, the State House, they haven't been able to come across any laws to do that.
Well, what happened was when Nat Kibben and I went to play with voting machines, how long ago was that?
That was two, maybe three years ago.
I don't think it was three years ago.
I remember everybody was adamant that, yes, these things are going to be used.
It's a law.
We have to use them for the next, you know, I think the next election, let alone the next presidential election.
And yet here we are in 2008, and we're still using the same machines.
I think it's a good thing actually because the – I've seen nothing but potential problems with both the electronic machines and the scanner machines, things that I could break very easily, things that remain unanswered, ways that the system –
if somebody with certain privileged access was able to do something bad, ways that they could do massive amounts of damage, whereas with a mechanical voting machine, yeah, you could probably mess something up, but only on an individual machine because they're not networked together.
And what strikes me most about that is the fact that really to quote-unquote upgrade from the mechanical machines, there really isn't anything to upgrade to that not only can be subverted or, you know, fail in some way.
These are things that have failed quite publicly, and, you know, it's well known how they failed, and it's been pretty spectacular.
And, you know, you really can't see an advantage to upgrading.
And when I think of – I mean people do get very confused easily especially if they're not already technically inclined, and I find myself getting more and more confused with every passing day.
Today it took me a half hour to open up a package of CDs.
I still don't understand how you're supposed to press it to open the thing.
But regardless, people should not feel that kind of confusion when they're going into the polling booth.
It should be very, very simple.
And I've already heard from some of the people that have been voting early that there's confusion in various states when they press a particular candidate.
The other candidate shows up.
They were selecting Barack Obama and John McCain showed up.
Now the authorities, the people in charge of the voting machines are saying, well, they were pressing it wrong.
I only call anyone ever being confused by the levers where you just – you have that solid metal clunk when you press it down and you know that that is – you've made your selection.
Now whether or not it works beyond that, that's – I guess that's for the inspectors to figure out.
But it should never be a case where you press a button and something else happens and you have to troubleshoot it right there inside the polling booth yourself.
Yeah, from the user's perspective, it's very straightforward and simple, and people have been using it for – I don't know how long those things have been around.
But it's really hard to make a mistake with one of those.
Now there are some places, I think even fewer than what we have with the mechanical machines that still use written ballots.
I guess they're way out in the sticks where they don't even have electricity or something like that.
But there's not much you can do other than just make up new ballots or throw away the ballots to create confusion or fraud there.
And I know in Canada, they use these particular ballots for various elections and they're just simply written out.
So you can't really mess it up.
Yeah, and the only, I guess, detriment that can be seen from the other standpoint of the people who have to count the things is it's actually work to do.
You actually have to use a few brain cells and see what the thing says before tallying it on whatever you tally it on.
So it's mostly, I think, a way of downsizing all that into just running it through some machine that doesn't have any accountability,
that doesn't have any sort of, I don't know, responsibility that a human reading the things would have.
Yeah, the scariest part is that with the optical scan machines and the electronic machines,
they all go straight to the people that count the votes are the people that make the machines.
Yeah.
Like Diebold and all those companies, the SNS and Sequoia.
It shouldn't be them.
I mean, that just is so wrong right there.
It should be volunteers from the community, people that don't represent a particular candidate, or at least people who represent all the candidates, and a lot of oversight.
And here, there is really not enough oversight.
There's too much.
There's no oversight at all.
I mean, a lot of people are focusing on how the machines themselves can be, the individual machines can be hacked,
and also how the machines, like, malfunction or, quote, unquote, malfunction to switch votes.
But I think that that's another security hole.
The fact that the corporations that make the machines are the ones counting the votes.
It's like we've outsourced the counting of votes.
Yeah.
This is a famous Stalin quote.
I forget exactly what it was, but it's like people who control the votes control the government or something to that extent.
I thought Reagan said that.
Stalin, Reagan, no difference.
Okay.
Well, that was what I was saying, but in a more subtle way.
Now, Tiffany, now you're from where?
Maine.
You're from Maine.
Southern Maine.
Okay.
So in Maine, they must use pencils and paper, right?
No.
They're not electronic at all.
No, really?
We do electronic, yeah.
They have electronics up there.
I'm in the southern part of Maine.
In northern Maine, I can't tell you.
Is southern Maine the real Maine or the fake American Maine?
Well, Philip Morris is the name of a guy who was running for, I believe, mayor of the city of Portland last year,
and he told us we are not the real Maine.
He wanted to sever off southern Maine and give it back to Massachusetts.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
That's one of the border skirmishes we have in the states.
Would you really mind that, being part of Massachusetts?
Actually, the taxes would be less.
We're the second highest taxes for corporate.
Why doesn't northern Maine elect to become part of Canada?
That would be kind of cool.
Yeah.
I think some of them would probably like to go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why don't we do that in New York, too?
We've had some voting problems in Maine, too.
In just the small town in which I live, the voting machines were watched by just some of the people who were looking up voter registration.
And the night before the last election, the windows were left unlocked in the room.
Oh, nice.
Someone broke in, stole the computers in the office, took the big vault with all of the people's checks and paying for car registration.
And the next morning, the people came into work and realized there was a break-in.
But they said, you know what?
I think they left the machines just fine.
I think they're all right.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And probably there were petty criminals just looking for cash and computers.
But they could have injected all kinds of nefarious software onto the machines there.
Who knows?
That is very possible.
Weren't they required to notify some kind of state authority or something to let them know this?
I think they were required.
I don't know if they did.
Wow.
That's something.
Well, OK.
So you've been using – what's the voting procedure like there?
We have the scan.
You complete the arrow with a black marker.
Then they scan it.
All right.
Yeah.
So they scan this.
And how do you know that it's scanning properly?
Do you see some kind of display?
No.
Or do you get a receipt or something?
No.
You just see that your card goes in and it counts it.
I think it just can tell when the ballot goes in the box.
That's it.
You can't tell if it did it right.
Wow.
Do we have here at Off the Hook, can we agree on what the best type of system is or would be?
Bernie, I'm going to start with you.
Any ideas?
I would say first paper, pen and paper or pencil and paper or optical scan.
All right.
Let me stop you at the pen and paper example.
You have an election with a couple of dozen choices for various things and propositions
and all sorts of nonsense like that.
Does pen and paper still work for something that's just not simply a yes or no?
Well, how many – I'm sure they do.
I used a paper ballot a couple of years ago and it was very clear.
It was a big broad sheet like the New York Times as far as the size of paper goes.
Right.
But it was very intuitive.
Now, of course, it obviously relies on the voting area, how they lay out the printing layout of it.
So it's really subjective to say, yeah, it makes sense or it doesn't make sense.
It's just like anything.
If you design it clearly, it will work out well.
The problem is counting them.
You can't really – they're not really machine readable.
That's why I used the optical scan ballot as the second choice.
That's where the voter fills in a circle or some object on a piece of paper with a pencil
or something that can be detected optically, and those can be scanned electronically.
And it can be – there's a paper trail.
You can go back and look at the things again.
So I think that's probably the best compromise between electronic and paper ballots.
The ones that I saw, the scanning machines that I saw, just seemed very easy to break,
and they didn't seem well put together or sturdy or anything like that.
And I just imagined all sorts of potential problems with them.
I mean I have yet to actually vote with one.
That was the whole premise of the film from I think two years ago, Hacking Democracy.
Yes.
Which I think is time to plug again.
It's still relevant today.
That was only with optical scan machines.
And they're saying how you can change the paper trail.
I think that video is still – if you want to see it, it's still on Google Video.
Just type in Hacking Democracy.
It's like a 90-minute video.
It's really good.
This is actually an assignment that we at Off the Hook are giving to all our listeners.
Watch Hacking Democracy.
Go to Google Video.
It's legal.
You're not breaking a law by watching it.
And just learn something.
It's not technical at all.
No, it's not technical.
Although there's certainly technical nuances if you are so inclined to pursue them.
But you'll see.
You'll see what the actual issues are and what the concerns are.
It's not a bunch of lunatics running around saying it's the end of the world.
These are real concerns.
And we should, especially with the last couple of presidential elections,
the shenanigans that went on in Florida and Ohio, swing states,
you better be concerned about this.
It does matter.
And as people who mess around with computers and break things all the time,
we know when something isn't quite right and needs to be addressed
and when the wool is being pulled over people's eyes.
Interesting.
One of the people involved in that film, I believe,
Bo Lipari, has an interesting piece out in his blog,
which you can get to www.nyvv.org slash bobblog.
And basically the story posted yesterday is entitled
1,500,000 New York State voters purged.
Now, it's not a Stalinist purge or anything like that.
This is a different kind of purge.
And basically he says that New York State has purged 1,661,244 voters,
voter records, almost 14% of them actually, from active.
They've changed the status from active to purged or inactive,
meaning they will not be in the poll books on Election Day.
Whether or not these changes are valid is anybody's guess.
There's no way to know for sure how many of these have been
incorrectly removed from active status.
But he says, I'll wager that a significant number of these records
are actually legally registered voters who should be allowed to vote
on Election Day but won't be.
And basically he gives an example of how somebody could be removed.
We see that the New York City Board of Elections has set over
a half million voter records to inactive status because they did not respond
to a letter from the board saying they intended to cancel their registration.
And I guarantee that some percentage, likely very large,
of these New York City voters are legally registered
and they never saw the board's letter.
They're going to show up on Election Day and be turned away from the polls.
Things like this are happening all throughout the country.
And it's nothing new.
So you have to keep an eye out for various problems like that,
including something like this is actually a little bit funny.
But some New York absentee ballots had a little misprint in Rensselaer County.
They misprinted Barack Obama's name as Barack Osama.
Not kidding.
They really did this, and it's causing a whole big thing here.
Now, they say it's a typo, but look at a keyboard.
Is the S anywhere near the B?
It's not.
They were using a Dvorak keyboard.
All right.
Well, Dvorak keyboard, is it near?
I don't even have that in front of me, so I don't know.
Yeah.
All right.
So, Bernie, you said that pen and paper is the best system.
Well, I found it the most satisfying from a user interface.
I mean, you were really looking at a form with a checklist,
and you just checked off what you wanted, and it just felt very tangible.
But, again, the problem I pointed out is it's not easily machine readable,
whereby the optical scan system where there's a card
and you just fill in the circles with a number two pencil or whatever,
that I think is a good compromise between a paper ballot
and something that can be counted efficiently.
And look back again, if you want to do a recount,
you have a physical medium you can look at to see what the voters' original intention was.
Well, I like the idea of having something physical that you fill out yourself,
a piece of paper, rather than pressing buttons
and just assuming that the buttons are doing the right thing.
Now, of course, we live our lives by computers these days,
so we're always making that assumption.
But for something as basic as voting,
I think we sort of want to hold on to something from the past, that simplicity.
So I got to say that of the options, if mechanical is not going to be one of the options,
scanning seems to be a better choice, but not necessarily a great choice.
Tiffany, what do you think?
Manual?
Actually, we'll get back to you, Bernie, in a second,
but I want to ask Tiffany what she thinks about the best method.
Yeah, I think I agree with Bernie.
The optical scan is the best, especially in Maine,
when most of the population is elderly.
They're not going to be wanting to push a lot of buttons on a computerized voting machine.
We just complete the arrow.
You can tell exactly who you're voting for, and that's pretty simple.
Yeah, when we played with the electronic machines, Kevin,
there were all kinds of little notes and error messages and things like that,
things that computer people might know.
But imagine putting your grandmother inside that polling place
and expecting her to know what exactly every single combination of buttons means
and what the strange error that comes up if you do something wrong means.
It becomes very intimidating,
and I think the result will be that people will just not want to be involved at all.
Oh, I could definitely see it being very intimidating.
Just the size of the machines alone were half the room.
Yeah, they were.
They were scary.
They scared me.
And they were coming.
I mean, I have a little technical background, I guess,
and the machines at first were actually confusing.
You know, pushing one button did the opposite thing.
So I completely understand where they're coming from.
I mean, it's bad software design for one thing in many cases.
For instance, every time we get a new phone,
there's always something about the phones that we get that annoys us.
Just why do they do it this way?
Why do I have to hit this button to get this result?
And it's counterintuitive.
And the one thing about simplicity is that it's not counterintuitive.
It's very intuitive.
It's something that everybody can understand.
As long as you know how to read and write, you can pretty much muddle through it.
Now, Bernie, you had a comment?
Yeah, there is a local radio talk show here in Philadelphia
about this very topic we're talking about last week.
And I called in because something occurred to me while I was listening to the guest,
and that is why haven't internationally recognized quality standards
ever been applied to voting systems,
like standards like the ISO 9000, 9001, 9002, 9003, or Six Sigma?
These are internationally accepted quality control standards
that can be applied to virtually any kind of system.
And I'm curious.
Maybe Tiffany has some information about this.
Why hasn't something like that been universally applied to all voting systems?
I mean, it could be all kinds of different voting systems,
but they should be able to meet some standard of quality.
I think that the paperwork is one.
I hate to say that it's a bureaucracy if it's one of the reasons why
they haven't applied any quality standards like that.
But I know even for Six Sigma, there's a ton of paperwork required
that has to be submitted to the government for a company to be considered compliant.
And I would like to think that someday we will have some oversight like that
for the voting system.
But right now, I hate to say that I think it's just a bureaucracy.
Rob T. Firefly, what's your solution?
Well, I would say given that mechanical is not an option anymore,
the basic idea behind all of this is that when—
Wait, wait, wait. Why is it not an option anymore?
I don't know why.
Who suddenly decided mechanical voting was our biggest enemy?
Why does it have to change?
Yeah, they're big. They're clunky.
Maybe they're not the prettiest machines in the world,
but we know what they're for.
People treat them with respect, and they—
They don't break down nearly as often as any of the optical scans
or the electronic machines.
Okay. Is that a fact or are you just saying that?
Well, I don't know. I've never seen it.
Because I know they do break down,
and they have to be cannibalized to parts a lot.
Yeah, but like any other technology that's been around for at least 50 years,
people pretty much have a handle on if it breaks down,
what's wrong with it, and how to fix it.
Remember, as a parallel, the old-fashioned telephone.
Indeed.
The nice—you know, the handset you could really kill somebody with,
the bell that meant business when it rang,
and the connection, the voice quality that actually sounded good,
much better than what we have today.
These phones, they lasted for decades.
They're still around, in fact.
Now, that's technology built to last.
So it feels like a commercial, but it's true.
And voting machines, old-fashioned ones, I feel the same way about,
whereas the new-fangled ones,
you're probably going to have to trash them in two years
and update them with the newest model, just like an iPhone.
And that's the point behind it, I think,
because there are some large companies that make these machines
that can make a lot of money by instituting them
in the public sector in a large scale.
So, you know, they want to sell the thing,
so we've got to buy it, apparently.
So what's your solution?
So my solution is I would have to go along with the optical scanning as well
because there's some remnant of a physical vote.
But the real problem behind any of this is that at some point,
even with the mechanical machines,
at some point your physical vote has to be turned into data
so it can be, you know, sent off and calculated and so on.
But as long as there is a physical piece of paper
that you've already approved, that you say,
yes, that is my vote, and that still exists in some form,
then, yeah, I mean, sometimes the idea of a recount
is simply to do it again, to put it through the same bad software
and say, oh, look, I came up with the same answer.
But as long as the possibility exists for somebody to actually go through one by one
and look with their human eyes and count it that way,
then at least that possibility of a fair vote
and finding out where the problem is,
at least that is still there someplace.
But then, like with the system Tiffany was describing,
when you fill out the card and then you put it in a box and it gets scanned,
that paper ballot might as well not exist anymore
and your vote is basically data at that point.
And, you know, the problem behind any of this is,
where is it going to become data?
Is it going to become data in some, you know, protected facility somewhere
run by the Board of Elections, or is it going to become data in, you know,
the gymnasium of a school or something else
where it will be left in front of an open window overnight
to, you know, have anything done with it?
Right.
I think the current system is that it's sent,
the, like, memory chips that are inside the optical scan machines
are sent to Diebold, who has, like, the, it's like proprietary software.
Diebold, the company that runs the machines, those particular machines.
They're the only people that are able to count them.
So then they send them off to the Board of Elections afterwards.
Well, it's filled with all kinds of troubling possibilities there.
All right, Nat, Kevin, what's your solution?
I'm going to go with the low-tech option of pencil and paper.
Yeah?
It's time-tested and proven to work,
and it requires human interaction.
And, of course, there will be errors,
but probably a lot less than a bad piece of software.
Okay, so you're going even lower-tech than the mechanical machines.
Even lower-tech.
I mean, look at Canada, look at Australia.
It works.
The mechanical voting machines also have problems,
but pencil and paper, it's intuitive, it's simple.
Anyone who's taken a test before can vote.
There's no reason to expand upon and go to huge,
room-size electronic voting machines.
I'm not certain how familiar most Americans are with pencils and paper these days.
Television, yeah, if you can figure television into this somehow,
you might have something.
So you get a TiVo, right, and then you...
Voltaire, your solution?
I think that mechanical machines, as we have right now,
mechanical voting machines in New York are probably the best solution.
You're voting for the first time this November, aren't you?
I am.
Wow, so it must be rather thrilling.
Yeah.
To use the old-fashioned mechanical machines.
I've had plenty of experience, though.
Thankfully, my parents have been kind of, like, active
in making sure that I know about the experience of voting.
You have a voting machine in the house that you practice with?
Yeah.
Great.
You know, we should all have one of those, just so we know.
There's probably plenty of mechanical voting machines
flying around from old states that got rid of them
before they switched to digital.
Yeah, what do they do with all those?
Send them to the third world somewhere.
Probably like what they do with electric cars,
and they put them into landfills and stuff.
Send them into orbit.
I have a question, though.
Concerning the election back in 2000,
the whole Florida recount, which was ordered stopped
and was never actually completed,
has that ever been completed?
Has anyone ever gone in there and simply counted by hand
all of those ballots to see exactly what the number really would have been?
And are we forbidden from ever doing so?
Bernie, what do you think?
I think that was done.
Contrary to what a lot of people thought would happen
and contrary to what I really wish had happened,
I think actually Bush got a few more votes.
Now, I could be wrong about that,
but I think I read that there was a couple of organizations
that actually did subpoena the records
or Freedom of Information Act or whatever,
and they went back and recounted them.
I could be mistaken about that because this was many years ago.
Well, if you are mistaken about that,
I doubt somebody will call in and correct you,
and we'll be taking phone calls in just a little bit.
But, yeah, it's something I've been wondering about for many years.
Well, now I'm demanding a recount.
Of what? Florida?
Florida.
Okay.
Well, the question I have is
do they just keep these paper ballots forever for every election?
There must be just a whole series of buildings someplace
that has nothing but pieces of paper from the 1950s on.
I'm sure they're thrown out.
But when? When are they thrown out?
Immediately after.
I'm sure they'd like to throw it out the day of,
but I don't know.
It should be a museum, a museum of the ballots,
the Florida ballots from 2000.
That would be something.
Okay, speaking of election stuff,
Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate
to buy ad space inside a video game.
Yes, we could make this up.
According to the Associated Press,
Obama's mug can now be seen in nine different EA games
connected to the Internet,
including Madden NFL 09 and Burnout Paradise
in an effort to appeal to the hard-to-reach
18- to 34-year-old male demographic.
You know, it's going to reach a lot of 12- to 16-year-olds as well,
I think, but whatever.
What we're trying to do is offer ads in games
where we're simulating a real-world environment.
So our racing games, our sports games,
lend themselves to that,
said EA spokeswoman Holly Rockwood.
That's very appealing to our advertisers.
The ads will run through November 3rd,
and they're not disclosing how much revenue
is being made by the publisher
in working with the Obama campaign.
In-game advertising made its way into games
roughly 18 months ago,
but unlike other forms of distribution
where sponsorships are often used to subsidize
or even obviate the price to consumers,
gamers are still required to pay full price
for the games they buy,
an average of $50 to $60.
So, yeah, interesting.
Have you seen an ad in a virtual world?
I saw one of these, in fact.
Did you?
Someone from Baltimore emailed me one of these ads.
It had a really nice-looking car in it,
and there was a billboard a little further out
that said Obama for president.
I don't think there are any in Grand Theft Auto.
I don't think there are any political ads there,
although there is a mayor that's running for something,
but he's a fictional mayor.
Okay, but speaking of the virtual world,
actually, we just got this story today,
and this is great.
A Dutch court has convicted two kids of theft
for stealing virtual items in a computer game
and sentenced them to community service
in the real world.
Only a handful of such cases have been heard,
and they have reached varying conclusions
about the legal status of virtual goods.
The Leewarden District Court said the culprits,
15 and 14 years old,
coerced a 13-year-old into transferring
a virtual amulet and a virtual mask
from the online adventure game RuneScape
to their game accounts.
These virtual goods are goods under Dutch law,
so this is theft, the court said yesterday
in a summary of its ruling.
Identities of the minors were not released.
The 15-year-old was sentenced to 200 hours service
and the 14-year-old to 160 hours.
My God, this is getting crazier, isn't it?
A virtual theft, but a real-life sentence.
You know, when I play computer games,
if I run over somebody,
am I going to find myself hauled before a judge now?
Well, at least for this, in this occasion,
the theft implies that they actually take,
they took away the items from somebody else.
But they took it away in a virtual world.
Yeah, but, like, there's only one item, but...
Only because the game says there's only one.
They could easily make a copy of it.
If they had made a copy of a song, for example,
they would have said, oh, you're thieves, you're pirates,
and they would have sued them for hundreds of thousands of dollars,
even though both people would have the song
and nobody would lose that song.
So, I mean, you can't really call that theft or piracy.
Tiffany?
There has been virtual terrorism online.
Cyberterrorism.
Cyberterrorism, yeah.
Okay, so, you know, if you're playing Grand Theft Auto,
you are the terrorist.
You're running people over and stealing cars
and fighting with the police.
I mean, they really, if they wanted to get you,
I guess they could get you for playing a round of that, couldn't they?
I don't know about that, but I do know that the FBI has people
who just, all they do is they play these games online all day long.
That sounds like a fantastic job.
Are you kidding me?
No, I'm not.
The FBI has people playing video games all day long.
Yeah.
And what exactly are they looking for?
Well, they're looking...
People stealing amulets?
I know that terrorists are trying to recruit people in these online worlds,
and they blew up an island in one of them.
I don't know if you heard about that.
They are aware that these are fictitious characters
that are shooting at other players in the game.
Are they not actually investigating monsters and things like that
running around in virtual worlds?
I think they are.
Like, at Second Life, they have quite a presence in Second Life.
Yeah, because...
I know people actually pay money for things in Second Life.
They do.
They buy virtual land and pay real money.
They do.
I just think that's Darwinism in action right there.
You cannot get dumber than that.
I'm sorry.
You just can't.
But FBI is really taking this seriously.
Yeah.
What amazes me is how the designers of Second Life
allow for a group to get together and blow up one of their properties.
I think that's kind of interesting in a way that it is possible to do.
Wow.
This is all pretty amazing.
I don't know.
Around 20 years ago one night, I was eaten by a grue.
Now I'm wondering if I could charge the grue with assault.
You're entitled to damages.
Are you not part of the class action suit against the grues?
Because, yeah, a lot of people are collecting from that.
I know.
It was pitch dark in there.
Yeah.
I once got lost in a twisty maze of passages.
All alike.
And I got to tell you, to this day,
the emotional toil that I have to go through
every time I see a passageway.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
We're going to take phone calls.
212-209-2900.
That's our phone number.
But first, this bit of news.
Yes, it's true.
The French Cabinet's spokesman says
swindlers have broken into the personal bank account
of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
That's true.
They actually did.
Investigations underway.
They insist the incident proves that the system of checking
bank accounts via the Internet isn't infallible.
That's according to spokesman Luc Châtel.
Weekly journal Du Dimanche reported Sunday
that thieves seized Sarkozy's bank account information
and swiped small sums of money.
The newspaper said Sarkozy reported the theft last month
and that those responsible haven't been found.
The report cited an unnamed official
close to the investigation for its information.
Apparently, they simply got a four-digit PIN
and were able to run with that.
Not very secure.
I don't know if it qualifies as identity theft,
but I guess it's troubling.
I love that something of that magnitude
is behind a four-digit PIN.
Yeah.
How many people's bank cards use anything beyond
the four-digit PIN these days?
Well, in the U.S., they don't even have the PIN.
That's right.
You know, I've been using my credit card lately
at various stores, and I'm not asked for signatures anymore.
It's not one of the RFID ones.
Tiffany, you know the RFID cards.
Well, actually, you don't have to be asked for the signature
if it's less than, I think, $20.
I have something that was almost $40 the other day,
and they just wished me a nice day and gave me my receipt.
So the number's going up.
I remember it was $15 or $20 a few months ago,
and now I think it's gone up again.
Yeah, I think the only time that somebody ever checked
my signature was actually in Europe,
and a lady looked through it thoroughly,
and she wouldn't give me my card back
until she checked the signature was right.
No one checks signatures anymore,
and now they don't even ask for signatures a lot of the time.
Okay, what else?
Soon you may need a passport if you want to buy a mobile phone.
This is from The Times Online in the UK.
Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced
to register their identity on a national database
on the government plans to extend massively
the powers of state surveillance.
Phone buyers would have to present a passport
or other official form of identification
at the point of purchase.
Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move
to create a surveillance society.
Are there privacy campaigners left in the UK?
There are.
There are lots of them, actually.
They're mostly on the run, but they're out there.
Now, in this country, of course,
you don't have to present a passport to buy a cellular phone
because most people don't have passports,
but I don't know.
Bernie, what do you think?
Do you think the day is coming?
Oh, yeah.
I think it's only a matter of time
before the U.S. government cracks down on this.
The FBI has been requesting for years
to know the identity of everybody who buys
one of these prepaid cell phones.
They do look up in the video game occasionally
to ask for something from the government.
That's nice to know.
It still doesn't stop straw buyers
from buying them in quantity
and letting other people use them.
Wait, what did you call them?
What kind of buyers?
Straw buyers.
Straw buyers.
Somebody just buying.
Say you went in and bought 10 prepaid cell phones
and then sold them to some shady guy in the corner
who then sold them to the bad guys.
You know, something like that.
So, you know, that would, you know,
So you'd be the one that we could lock up
if the calls got traced back to your name.
But I think it's a matter of time.
It's a loophole in the whole tracking system
that our government has on who has,
who is registered to what phone number
these prepaid cell phones.
And the U.K. is now closing that loophole.
And I think, you know, usually the U.K.
is just a few steps ahead of us
as far as Orwellian surveillance.
I read that at Walmart, to get a prepaid phone,
you can't buy more than one, I believe.
And if you try to buy it in cash,
they'll ask you for ID.
I've been going through this for years.
I've been trying to get, I have a prepaid cell phone.
I was able to buy one unlocked on eBay
because I didn't want to be locked to one server
or one service or another.
But the problem I had then is I went around
all kinds of places to try to get service.
And they demanded a Social Security number for that.
And so I don't think we're very far from the U.S.
requiring a passport for that.
Or a driver's license or something along those lines.
I was actually pretty sure to buy a prepaid phone here,
you have to present a driver's license at least.
To buy a prepaid.
To buy a prepaid in cash.
Interesting.
Not true. Not here.
I bought one at T-Mobile.
In fact, the one I bought for a friend, Jim,
several months ago.
I did not have to present any ID to buy it.
It was actually a used phone I had.
But I purchased a new SIM card and got a number for it
at a T-Mobile store.
And I wasn't asked for any ID at all.
All right.
Well, certainly, I think we're in agreement
that we're going down a road towards more identity checks
and more surveillance and things like that.
It's not good.
You mentioned Jim.
Let's have an update on Jim
because a bunch of us saw him over the weekend.
Yeah.
Well, many of us in the studio know this already.
But for those who weren't with us,
four of us went to visit Jim.
You, Emanuel, myself, Rob, and Juntz.
And for those of us,
for those of the listeners who don't know the story,
Jim, a former co-host here on Off The Hook,
suffered a stroke about a year ago
and has been recovering ever since.
And it was about two weeks ago that he got away
from the nursing home that he's been held in
and made his way all the way down to Atlantic City
to play poker and came back on his own.
And that was kind of, I guess,
a declaration of independence of sorts.
Yeah.
In fact, the folks at the nursing home were really concerned
and tearing their hair out with worry
and worry for themselves and their own reputation
as well as for Jim's safety because he needed his medication,
which he hadn't had for several days.
But in the end, they told me that the silver lining in all this
is it demonstrated that Jim is more than capable
of being independent
and he's not going to get lost anywhere.
He's got all the mental faculties.
He has trouble communicating verbally and in writing,
and that seems to be pretty much it.
And a lot of people at the nursing home staff
didn't believe that he had such abilities,
and now there's no question that if he could make his way
all the way down to Atlantic City and back,
that's not a problem.
Now, we were able to communicate with Jim
for several hours on Saturday,
and we found out some more details about what happened.
It turns out he did take $300 with him,
and he managed to gamble for about 3 1⁄2 days
playing poker at an Atlantic City casino
and kept getting meals comped to him by the casinos
because he kept playing,
which is, I guess, the system they had down here.
And I don't think any of the rest of us who visited him on Sunday
could have lasted maybe more than half an hour
with $300 at a casino poker table.
Or let alone find Atlantic City.
Yeah, well, you know, you have to...
Well, he took a bus down there, but you have to know where he took the bus and whatever.
But still, I think that's an amazing feat for anyone,
let alone someone who's thought to not have his full mental abilities.
And obviously that's not the case.
He would be able to keep the food coming
with gambling for 3 1⁄2 days with just $300 and not busting.
It's an impressive feat.
Well, anyway, just to speed this up a little bit,
the upshot is that we realize that Jim needs a better place
than where he is right now.
We've had a tremendous amount of listener feedback to the show last week
with suggestions.
In fact, we even met one woman out in the lobby
who offered to help us with advocates and going through the system.
We have not been able to reach you.
If you're listening, we've been trying to call you,
send you an email or something like that.
But we're trying to pursue these leads
and hopefully get Jim into a better place very quickly.
I think it can move rather fast.
Yeah, and I have some good news too.
Tomorrow, an adult home facility is going to...
A representative from an adult home facility in Brooklyn
is going to come to the nursing home Jim is in
and interview him personally
and see whether they feel that he would be
an appropriate resident of their facility.
So that's supposedly going to happen tomorrow.
And there's other facilities too that could interview him.
But this is going to happen tomorrow, so that's a good sign.
And Jim was all for this.
It was one of the places he said he'd be interested in moving to.
It's just not appropriate for him to be in a nursing home
because he's got so much ability.
And he can do everything except communicate clearly sometimes.
What would this new facility offer that this one does not,
the current one does not?
From what I understand,
he would have the ability during the day to come and go,
and he would have more flexibility just to...
In a facility where people with similar abilities are living
instead of in a nursing home
where a lot of people are spending their final days,
that's not anything close to Jim's capability.
And would he be getting intensive speech therapy?
Because I think that's something that he has not been getting
because that needs to develop.
Right.
He is a psychologist that visits him once a week
who I think is very good,
but it's just a limited amount of time she can spend with him every week.
So I think one of the things I would hope to happen
is this new facility,
he would have access to more speech therapy and writing therapy
to get those parts of his brain working again.
Yeah, I don't think once a week is nearly enough for that kind of therapy.
Basically, you have to learn how to enunciate a lover again
and how to connect thoughts to words.
Now, it was really clear that he could communicate to us pretty well
because we know him, we know his mannerisms and so forth,
and we could just sort of play charades with him
and he could convey just about anything he wanted to us.
It just took time and you had to kind of know him.
But for people who don't know Jim,
you might have a little more trouble communicating with him
because they're not familiar with how we gesticulate and so forth.
But he's all there and we just need to get him therapy needs
so he can get back into society in the way he used to be.
Yeah, that's something that really struck me during the visit.
When I went to see him, I noticed that when we first showed up,
okay, he had some difficulty communicating,
but the longer we were there and the longer we were having conversations
and he was holding up his end of them, the clearer his words got.
And it's just so obvious that the best thing for him has got to be stimulation.
Constant interaction.
He's got to interact.
He's got to use that brilliant mind of his because he is brilliant.
I don't know if you felt this, but hanging out in that place,
no offense to the people who run that place, but it was depressing.
You see people in all sorts of states of deterioration
and it just seems so closed in.
And I was very happy to get outside.
If I were Jim, I would have done the same thing.
I probably would have done it a lot sooner
and probably not with as positive a result.
For somebody who values freedom, it's totally understandable.
Jim, hopefully you're out there listening right now.
We're working on getting you to a much better place, so hang in there.
We're going to figure this out with the help of our listeners.
Our email address, oth at 2600.com.
That's something you can add to the process,
to this whole conversation that we've been having.
Again, we will try and reach the person who offered to help us last week,
again, maybe after the show.
Number 212-209-2900.
If you have any thoughts on this or election stuff,
we only have a few minutes left.
Let's take our first call down here.
Good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
Good evening, everyone.
How are you doing?
I'm sorry, I don't remember as much of this story as I'd like to tell.
It was a long work day, but this morning on Democracy Now!
there was someone who went over the details
of some strange things going on with Ohio
and how there was basically a man-in-the-middle type of situation
from the voting locations.
Those results were sent to, I believe, Tennessee or Kentucky,
and then they were sent back to the state elections board.
They were sent to Tennessee?
Did they have the liberal fringe filtered out of the votes or something?
What exactly was the purpose of that?
The traffic was sent to some server.
I apologize for not remembering all the details.
Anybody who's on today's Democracy Now!
You can go to democracynow.org,
and any of our listeners can listen to the story there, I suppose.
Yeah, I recommend definitely listening to that.
A lot of good stories, a lot of good interviews.
Caller, any thoughts on what the best system is?
I don't know.
I've used myself the Completing the Arrow in Maryland,
but I live in New Jersey now, and I like the arrows.
You like the arrows?
Yeah.
Here we have some systems in New Jersey from ES&S, I believe,
and I don't remember the one I used last,
but it was, I guess, quasi-electronic.
You pushed a lit-up button that was under a sheet of paper.
I'm assuming the buttons are wired correctly.
Yes, you have to make a lot of assumptions.
Definitely true.
All right, thanks for your call.
Now, Kevin, you're shaking your head when ES&S is mentioned.
Yes, I remember their machine breaking very frequently when we played around with it.
When we played around with it, yes.
And that's the thing.
If you're a hacker, and you're presented with an electronic voting machine,
do you think you don't have the obligation to try and figure out a way to screw it up?
Because obviously, if you can do it, someone else is going to do it.
And I think this is something that's so important,
and it's a perfect example of how hacking can be used in a positive way.
Of course, we'll be blamed for any problems.
Naturally, that's how it goes.
But if we don't uncover these security holes,
then odds are the world will be pulled over our eyes for many years to come.
Very scary.
All right.
2-1-2-2-0-9-2-9-100.
And good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Hey there.
I'd like to talk about voter protection and early voting.
First of all, I think that more people of color
will not be able to vote in any other election we've ever had before.
So if anybody wants to do voter protection for this time around,
I don't know why there hasn't been a volunteer campaign call out for that.
It's really weird.
But I did my research and found out that the ACLU is doing it.
So call your local ACLU and hop to it.
The trainings are, like, you know, not too many left.
And they are this weekend.
And there's a three-hour training and a four-hour shift.
And as far as early voting, I happened to be driving through Ohio,
and I saw Obama, and afterwards they had this thing.
They were like, everybody come and vote early, vote early.
And so people did.
And I talked to this lawyer from the Democratic Party,
and I said, what are all these votes being counted as?
And she said, absentee votes.
And I know a girl who's been a poll worker for many years in Ohio,
and she said that only count absentee votes when the election is closed.
So this morning I'm getting my car fixed in the sea,
and I walked down the television there at the mechanic station,
and they have 37 states that are doing early voting,
and they were showing lines of people at freaking 830 in the morning in Florida
and Georgia.
And so here's the deal.
If all the Democrats vote early and all the Republicans vote on Election Day,
won't the election not be closed?
And if all 37 states are counting their early votes as absentee ballots,
will they not count the votes?
I don't know if it's necessarily true that they will be counted as absentee votes.
I mean, that's what one person might have said.
But I have heard results.
I've heard on the radio today,
apparently the early voters are favoring Obama pretty heavily.
So obviously somebody must be counting them for that to be said, right?
Yeah, well, they're not supposed to.
Oh, yeah.
Those are exit polls?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you know, that's definitely something to be concerned with.
But I don't think Obama would be encouraging so many people to vote early
if he had the same suspicions, if this was something that was common.
So I've got a friend who's a reporter.
He's going to be calling and, you know, seeing if, indeed, that's the case,
if all of the early votes will be considered absentee votes.
All right.
Well, it's definitely something to keep our eyes on.
One more time, give the information out so people who are interested can get involved.
Well, for voter protection, definitely.
Just hang out, be a poll monitor for four hours on Election Day.
Another major thing, vote before 3 p.m.
Please, everybody, because, oh, yeah, if you want to be a voter, call the ACLU.
Wait, why vote before 3 p.m.?
Oh, okay.
My mom, she was ailing, and I personally went through a situation
where I tried to see a lawyer to get her to be able to vote
because she had to re-register to vote.
And this was in a suburb of New Jersey,
and there was nobody waiting to see the judge in front of me.
In combination with all of the different polling places,
all the different offices I had to go to and bring the paperwork back to her
and then bring it back to the office, it took five hours.
Okay.
So if you have a situation like that, definitely vote before 3 p.m.
Yeah, you should definitely.
If you think you're going to have to see a judge, vote before 3 p.m.
All right.
Hey, thanks for all the information, and keep on being active.
It's very important.
And I know a lot of our listeners are.
Let's take another phone call.
Hey, good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Oh, yes.
Speak up, please.
Nationalism is collapsing, and all I can tell you to do is go out and vote.
McCain terrorized Vietnam.
Bill Ayers is actually a hero, along with Kathy Boudin.
They're to be saluted, the weather people.
And along with Michael Pratt.
Weather people?
Uh-huh.
Wait, when did they become the weather people?
The weathermen?
I actually like that better.
Well, their real name is the weathermen.
I mean, we haven't gotten to the point of them being heroes yet.
Mr. Slogan Man here.
All right.
All I was saying was, I don't think they were called the weather people.
I think they were called the weathermen.
The weather underground, that was it, right?
Not weather people.
That sounds so silly.
Sounds like a band.
Yeah.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you doing?
All right.
What's on your mind?
I was wanting to talk about the case in the Netherlands of the two teenagers.
You've got to make it fast.
This is a virtual crime.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Well, apparently, part of the case was that the two teenagers had punched, kicked, and
threatened the 13-year-old boy with a knife at one point.
And they didn't get charged with that?
They got charged with stealing an amulet?
Yeah.
In the virtual world?
Yeah.
Okay.
That makes perfect sense.
Apparently, the court cited a prior decision regarding electricity and the theft of electricity
in that since electricity can be considered a material object for the purpose of criminal
law, somehow virtual objects can receive the same standard or the same consideration.
Uh-huh.
I'm really not sure about that, but that was just the coverage that I read of that particular
story.
All right.
Well, thanks for sharing that with us.
And, boy, good calls tonight.
Well, most of them.
Our email address, again, oth at 2600.com, if you have anything to add to the discussion
or anything you'd like to bring to the table, which we'll discuss next week, perhaps.
Tiffany, it's been great having you in the studio.
Thank you.
You're on your way to PumpCon, right?
Yes.
Actually, we can't really talk about PumpCon because it's invite only, and it's supposed
to be a secret.
But I'll probably see you there.
Thank you.
And I think some other folks here will be there as well.
So those people in the know, maybe we'll see you this weekend coming up.
And, Bernie, I believe we'll see you as well.
Yes, because it takes place somewhere near where I am.
Well, okay, now you've dropped that bombshell.
Now people know more about what they're not supposed to know anything about.
But, yeah, it's been fun in the past, and I'm sure we'll have fun at future gatherings
as well.
Any last announcements from anyone in the studio?
Anything people want to share with listeners?
We've had an amazing response with suggestions for a gym situation.
I'd like to just encourage our listeners to keep sending anything else they can think
of that would be of assistance with that.
Absolutely.
Th2600.com.
Take up that offer to vote as well.
It's important.
If you have a lot of free time, especially if you're a college student, you'll probably
have the day off.
So you might as well volunteer to do something like that.
Definitely get involved.
Get other people involved.
Those of you in swing states especially, make sure you get people involved because your
vote actually is going to count more.
It's just the way it works.
It's just our crazy system.
And in a couple of weeks, we're going to have some history being made here in this country.
So it'll be fun.
I think we have one normal show left before it all hits the fan.
Anyway, it's Emmanuel for Off the Hook.
Have yourselves a good night.
And here we are with yet another fun-related song.
Well, it's flooding down in Texas
All of the telephone lines are down
Yeah, it's flooding down in Texas
All of the telephone lines are down
Yeah, I've been trying to call my baby
Lord, I can't get a single sound
Well, the clouds are rolling
And I'm standing out in the rain
Yeah, the clouds are rolling
And I'm standing out in the rain
Yeah, the clouds are rolling
Well, blood water keep rolling
Mine is about to dry, pull me inside
And I'm standing out in the rain
Being president is fun
Uh-oh
Whoo!
Yeah, yeah, hey, cat, hey
Wow, I love the blues, it makes me feel so good
like somebody else has it even worse than I do.