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are defending what is best in America, and we should never forget that, especially when
we disagree with them, especially when they make us uncomfortable with their words.
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The time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off The Hook.
One, two, three, go!
And good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Red Hecht.
I'm in the corner tonight.
You're in the corner.
And my mic is off, right?
And you're also in a place with no microphone.
Say that again.
Hello.
There you are.
Okay.
Rob T. Firefly.
How you doing?
Good evening.
We have Voltaire.
Hi.
We have Mike.
Hi there.
And down in Philadelphia, we've got Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And special guest in the studio tonight is Steve Rombaum.
We're going to have some very interesting things to say to him, and he's going to have
some very interesting things to say to us.
But first, we've got some updates on various news things.
Our favorite subject, Bernie, the analog TV conversion.
It looks like everybody's talking about this now.
Yet again.
What's the latest?
Well, the saga never ends.
I think I have whiplash from following this story.
As some of our listeners may know, just a couple of days ago, the U.S. Senate voted to delay
the analog TV shutoff.
I believe it was a close vote, too.
What was it again?
I don't know what the exact count was.
It was 100 to 0 is what it was.
I was being sarcastic.
Okay.
Yeah.
It was unanimous.
Nobody was against it.
And they voted to extend this to, I believe, to June 17th, four months from now, more or
less, to give people more time to get their $40 vouchers because the fund ran out of money
and there's a waiting list.
And this was just poorly planned from the get-go.
So then yesterday, the House, by a near margin, just a handful of Republicans said, now, we're
not going to let this thing be delayed.
And it was scuttled, this whole move to delay it, which is a consumer-friendly bill.
There's really no negative consequences to this other than really slowing down when broadcasters
are going to throw the switch.
And as a result, people are going to have to run out and get a digital TV converter
at their own expense instead of with the voucher was what the deal was supposed to be.
Well, I got all confused just in the last couple of days because I thought what the
House was doing was simply saying that it's not mandatory that the stations turn off their
analog signal, that that could still go on until June.
But apparently, they want to move ahead and just turn everything off in February, right?
Yeah.
If any television station wanted, the way this bill was two days ago, that the Senate
voted unanimously, if any station wanted to go all digital come February 17th, I guess
it is, they could do it.
There's no objection.
But the Republicans said in the Senate yesterday said, no, they're not going to be allowed
to keep it on even if they want to, the analog service.
We'll see how this affects a lot of elderly people who may not be aware of this, shut-ins,
maybe handicapped people.
I hear people can live without TV, Bernie.
I think it's possible.
I think that people live without TV for a really, really long time.
You're absolutely right.
But millions of people in this country still rely on it as their lifeline to news and information.
And I'm not one of those people, but there's a lot of people out there like this.
So that's why it's news.
Here's the thing.
Looking at the story today, this is just two things that I think are enough to give us
all kinds of concerns here.
But basically, commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission saying in a letter
to Senator Rockefeller and Representative Henry Waxman that the country is nowhere near
ready for the signal switch.
These are commissioners from the FCC saying this.
And also, FCC commissioners saying that the new digital signals don't reach some communities
now served by the analog signals.
In other words, even if you do get the converter, you're not going to get a signal.
So those two things coming from FCC commissioners, I think those are serious concerns.
And I don't know why people would say we're ready when they're saying we're not.
And Commissioner Copps, who in fact was just appointed by Barack Obama to be the interim FCC chief,
sort of has been pushing for this delay all the time.
And actually, FCC several months ago conducted a test, a pilot test in Wilmington, North Carolina
to see what would happen when all the stations went digital.
And they went all the stations in Wilmington, North Carolina to go digital.
And a lot of people were just left without any reception at all, even though they had the box.
They just couldn't get the digital signal.
So there needs to be more study done on this.
Go ahead, Mike.
I'm not convinced that people without television is in fact the end of the world.
But I'm really unconvinced that four months would make much of a difference either way.
I mean, it seems to me one possibility is to just abort this switchover and keep analog television
for the foreseeable future until enough people have gotten rid of their old analog television sets or what have you.
And another possibility is to make the switchover.
But it's really unclear to me what is going to be different in June,
what is going to be substantially different in June from in February.
People will have time to get their vouchers.
Possibly.
If it's funded.
And also the fact that we'll just have to hear about it for another four months.
Well, you just want to get it over with, sink or swim, see what happens.
I'm kind of curious too.
Let's switch it over and let's see.
I agree with Mike.
I don't think in four months people are going to get their act together anyway.
They had how long to, you know, all TV since 2007.
Which people haven't gotten their act together?
Is it the consumer or the industry?
Well, I mean, okay.
In terms of the signal, I would say it's the industry.
If they haven't tested to see, you know, how far their signal covers, that's their own fault.
But I don't think they're going to change that at this point in the game anyway.
Here's my idea.
This is my suggestion.
How about we do it for two days and see what happens and see how crazy everybody goes.
And then two days later we turn everything back on and say, hey, did you survive?
And if so, okay, let's do it for real next time.
That's a good idea.
Okay.
We'll pass that on to the administration or whatever.
Okay.
Moving on because we have a lot to talk about this hour.
But this is an interesting story and no doubt you're going to hear more about it in the mass media.
I hope not for another four months.
If you get a converter box, maybe you won't hear anything about it.
I don't need a converter box.
You see, you don't need one.
If you needed one, I'll bet your position would be different about TV.
I'd probably just buy a new TV.
Okay.
Well, not everyone has that ability.
Now, if you heard about this, you can block Wi-Fi intruders now with a secure paint job.
Researchers are developing a kind of paint that can be used to block unauthorized visitors to wireless networks.
IT managers, they say, should start familiarizing themselves with the new security tool, the paint brush,
as Japanese researchers have come up with a paint that they say will block all these wireless signals.
Dot Red, you're here.
Wow.
You got something to say about this?
Yes.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Welcome.
So, this was a couple of years ago, and they were trying to use lead paint, but that wasn't working out too well.
Do you know what's different about this and how this might actually work?
I don't know exactly what's different, except that the Japanese have invented this, and supposedly it works.
Well, since it's Japanese, maybe it's better this time.
The paint can block higher frequencies.
It's got something to do with a frequency over 100 gigahertz,
and electromagnetic waves can only be blocked when a material's magnetic field resonates at the same frequency as the wave.
A scientist says that wave absorbers are usually made from iron-rich oxides,
but high-frequency transmissions outstrip the power of iron to absorb electromagnetic waves.
This is because the standard oxide coating has a maximum resonance frequency that is outstripped at 48 gigahertz.
I hope that's technical enough for you.
Did you say 100 gigahertz?
Because wireless is, like, 2.4.
I did say 100 gigahertz plus.
I'll just throw this article at you, and you can tell me if—oh, I'm sorry about that—if it makes any sense whatsoever.
Interesting.
Paint job to protect yourself.
Yes, Bernie?
If you don't want to spend all this money on this really expensive Japanese paint,
you can just get some copper screening and line the room with that and build your own Faraday cage,
which is the engineering term for something that shields electromagnetic waves,
and that'll work over a much wider range of frequencies.
It's just a fine copper mesh.
That's what these RFID passport protecting wallets have, is a very fine copper mesh in them.
Okay, interesting.
Yes, Mike?
Bernie, this stuff is Japanese, therefore it's much higher tech.
Okay.
Yes, go ahead.
I've got red.
I have another question, though.
Yeah.
There's been talk in the FCC about having a publicly accessible Wi-Fi nationwide.
Now, wouldn't that stop it from going into, say, people's houses if they tried to get that expansive?
How would they deal with that?
Would the government volunteer to put Wi-Fi inside people's homes?
You need to get your government paint dissolving voucher.
Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Okay, one more thing before we move on to the main story tonight.
I actually was using one of my online banking services.
I do use those occasionally.
This was kind of funny because I used Bank of America this time.
Yeah, I alternate.
I got greeted with this message on the screen that said,
you will need to change your online ID and passcode within your next two sign-ins to continue using online banking.
Bank of America is dedicated to ensuring that your accounts remain secure and your personal information remains private.
We have identified that your online ID and passcode must be updated to meet recommendations by security experts
who advise against using personally identifiable information such as your social security or account number as your online ID or passcode.
Here I am getting a lecture from the Bank of America about using my social security number as my online ID
when it was mandatory for me to use that as my online ID.
They're the ones that said you must enter your social security number here and that will be your online ID.
And here they've turned around and now they're lecturing me saying that this is not secure and you must change it.
It was their idea to start with.
So I just had to get that off my chest.
Typical bank way of dealing with security.
And it's great also that they make it sound like they're the ones that are – it's their idea to make things more secure.
I mean this is happening in lots of places, right?
Traditionally, your social security number has been used as your own personal identification number all over the place.
When I was in college, they used that.
Anytime – if I lost my key and I need to get another key, I would write my social security number on the paperwork to get my key.
And now they've changed that.
I know that now they use – they give you a random number which –
Give it a day or two and you can memorize a random number.
We've known since the 1970s that it's not secure to use your social security number for identifying purposes, any kind of corporation or anything like that.
And they're just figuring it out now.
Well, I think with the increase in like personal fraud and all that stuff, identity theft, I think it's –
But it does sound like however slowly they are figuring it out.
I mean I guess that's a good thing.
I'm glad that they're slowly making it across the finish line. Rob?
It's nice that the mainstream does eventually catch up.
I mean like if you guys remember more than a certain amount of years ago, everyone's computer logins were their first initial and last name at work and at school and things like that.
And it's kind of not the best idea.
Probably not. Probably not.
So progress marches forward slowly.
Okay.
You might recall a few months ago when we had Steve Rombaum on the show and also at the Last Hope Conference, I believe he mentioned that he was involved in tracking down some illicit activity or misbehavior on the part of a famous social networking site.
Social networking site like, oh, I don't know, Facebook or some of the other ones.
MySpace.
What else?
LinkedIn.
HuffSpace.
Don't forget HuffSpace.
What is it?
HuffSpace.
Never heard of that one.
It's run by David Hasselhoff.
Yeah, it's David Hasselhoff.
It's MySpace for David Hasselhoff fans.
Oh, my God.
It's the future.
Okay.
Well, in any event, I've been haranguing Steve to tell us once and for all already what's going on with this case because we still don't know anything about it.
And Steve is here tonight to tell us some, I guess, rather shocking news.
Do you want me to say the name of this social networking site, Steve, or would you like to be the one to actually?
Well, considering that it's been all over the media in the past 24 hours, I think it's a toss-up.
I thought we were getting the scoop.
Well, you're getting me.
All right.
Yeah, that's true.
Which is even better.
All right.
So, why don't you tell us who is it?
Who is the guilty party here?
I don't know that guilty party is the right way to characterize it, but the subject of our investigation was MySpace.
MySpace.
Okay.
Now, I'm looking at a story from Information Week here, and they say that MySpace.com maintains that it is committed to deleting—well, I'll get right into it—sex offenders.
They're deleting sex offenders.
They've been working hard with a technology company to identify them.
So, it sounds sort of like the Bank of America.
They're at the forefront of this, and they're moving forward, and they're taking direct action.
And I take it from the skeptical look on your face that they're not actually doing that.
Well, the skeptical look is related to the word forefront.
I was just sitting here hoping that nobody is doing a worse job than they are.
That's pretty strong.
Now, let me preface everything that we're going to say here tonight.
I was not hired to do an investigation of registered sex offenders on MySpace.
We had a yearlong investigation going on into a variety of very interesting aspects of MySpace's conduct.
And this is one of the things that we unexpectedly tripped over.
Like the rest of the online community, we assumed that MySpace had taken the nationwide list of registered sex offenders
and had purged their user roles of pedophiles and rapists and sexual batterers and all the other wonderful people out there who are a danger.
Okay, so now there is this list.
You call them RSOs, I believe, registered sex offenders.
Correct.
Now, are these organizations, Facebook and MySpace and all the other ones,
are they required to actually have a copy of this list and to go through it and compare it to whatever users they have on their system?
Is there an actual law? No.
Is it the most basic thing that a good online citizen and a good online host should be doing?
Absolutely.
MySpace goes out of its way, as, by the way, does Friendster and Facebook and all the other social networking sites,
to attract teenagers and even younger people.
And if they are going to provide a home, a place to hang out for these people, they need to make sure it's a safe place.
And certainly the most basic thing that they can do, if they're going to host children,
is make sure that there aren't sexual predators or child molesters slithering about their network.
Okay, Mike, go ahead.
Couldn't the sex offender, if one of the social networks did this, couldn't the sex offender just lie about his name or her name when creating a profile?
Absolutely. And then it becomes an entirely separate issue.
That seems to me almost worse, right?
If these people are going to be on these sites, it's better that they use their real names and they can be found.
Well, let me just say two things.
First of all, if you attended my talk at The Last Hope, you know that there are very, very effective ways to de-anonymize people on the net.
And that is something that we've been doing in connection with this investigation.
But that's not even a factor here.
The vast majority of the people that we found used their real first name, last name, city, state,
and we were able to compare the photo on their MySpace page or multiple photos on their MySpace pages to their mugshot.
These are people that, for a variety of reasons, are making no attempt to hide.
And we think that, first of all, it's because many of these people don't feel they've done anything wrong.
And second of all, I think it's absolute contempt, and I think, unfortunately, not inappropriate contempt, for MySpace's enforcement procedures.
Okay, we'll get to that in a second, but first I'd like to ask, legally, are registered sex offenders allowed to have MySpace pages?
Is there some kind of regulation that says they can't?
Terrific question, because the answer is many are not.
Many, as a condition of their parole, are not permitted to have an internet presence.
And in fact, we are dealing right now with the offices of three attorneys general,
one of whom, I'm not permitted to identify this AG's office,
but one of whom we're giving a report to next Wednesday of 100 RSOs in their state that have been confirmed by a manual check,
including comparison of photos, to have presences on MySpace.
And the AG's office has indicated to us they're going to look at the parole conditions for every single one of these 100 people,
and the people that we give them subsequently.
And every single one of them that has, as a parole condition, no internet presence, they will send state police out to pick up that day.
Okay, go ahead, Bernie.
Hi, Bernie, how are you?
Oh, hello, Steve, how are you?
Quick question, how many of these people do we know are actually on parole?
I would think that the minority of those are still on parole and have long since served their sentences.
What do you think?
Actually, it's quite the opposite. It's exactly the opposite.
Some of these people have a lifetime registration condition.
Is that parole?
A lot of them.
That's not parole, though, you're talking about.
This is a whole different Megan's Law thing. This is not parole.
Correct, correct, but a huge number of them are still on parole.
Many of them get outrageously long sentences.
You know what, let me withdraw the word outrageously long sentences.
I mean, many of these people deserve to be locked up for life, and they're receiving an enormous courtesy being allowed out of prison.
Well, I imagine you're referring to extreme cases, I suppose, not borderline cases.
Right, let me further define who I'm talking about.
There are some people who get onto registered sex offender lists literally for urinating in public because some small child walked by while they were urinating behind a tree and screamed for mommy.
Is that true?
Yes, it really is.
You can get on a registered sex offender list by urinating in public.
If you have a bad judge and a stupid prosecutor, yes.
That's not who we're talking about here today.
Everybody that I've included in the 12 volumes of the report that we've prepared, every single one is somebody that it is universally agreed they did something wrong.
A rapist, a child molester, the most horrible type of pedophile, people convicted of sexual battery.
None of these people are borderline, and none of these people there's any question about.
And yet they have no problem putting their real name and face on a MySpace page.
And staying there for years.
Okay, and I assume befriending lots of people that they probably shouldn't be befriending.
Well, you know, you're giving me great questions tonight because that leads into the key issue about what's going on with MySpace and RSOs.
MySpace, as part of their corporate culture, is very big on concealing evidence of any mistakes, apparently.
When they find an RSO, they not only delete that person's page, which is good, but they delete the entire friend history, the entire communication history, all their email activity, everything, which is very, very bad.
They do not make it available to law enforcement. It disappears forever into a black hole.
Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's destruction of potential evidence.
Especially if this RSO is somebody that has committed a crime, has committed a parole violation by signing up on MySpace.
How are they finding these offenders? Are they finding them on their own or at the behest of law enforcement?
They've hired a company called Sentinel Technology, who they describe as a ferocious advocate for the community and for keeping online activity safe.
And they say that Sentinel Technology has done a wonderful job of scrubbing their site.
Now, let me tell you, I had a conversation with a senior person in an attorney general office yesterday who told me that Sentinel Technology has testified, has given a statement to that AG's office, that they scrubbed the entire MySpace list twice a month.
Now, I've got here, and this is not television, so your listeners...
What is that there? You've got a book of...
This is numbers 1 through 25 of possible or probable registered sex offenders using MySpace.
We have 12 volumes like this, 25 RSOs per book that we've identified as being on MySpace.
If you look through this book, and those of you in the...
Studio.
In the studio, sorry. Had a little problem with English for a second.
Those of you in the studio are welcome to look through this book as the show goes on.
You will see that these are people who have presences on MySpace since 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.
If you take somebody from 2006, that means that somehow Sentinel Technologies has missed this person 72 times.
It's difficult for me to accept MySpace's statements as credible.
And let me make an obvious statement.
It's true that we are professional investigators, that I'm a director of an investigative agency.
It's true that I've got a terrific team that works at my online service.
But I am a multi-million dollar company, whereas MySpace is a multi-multi-billion dollar company.
An arm of Fox Interactive Media and a Fortune 100 company.
It's just not credible that in 29 hours of billable time, we could have found the first 100 RSOs and prepared the report.
And MySpace, after 72 scrubbings, could not have found the same RSO.
Typically, how would you find one of these offenders?
Well, it's terrifically easy.
And the first thing I want to say is, let me run some stats at you.
Let me run some figures by you.
We did not run all 600,000 nationwide registered sex offenders.
Although we do have them all in-house.
Their records, their related criminal records, their mugshots, everything.
We took a random sample of 40,000 RSOs.
And we ran them against a random sample of MySpace's webpages.
Which we had access to through a third party.
We ran the equivalent of 1% of possible matches.
And we got scrubbed hits.
We ran them a first time and then we ran them a second time.
And we got scrubbed hits totaling 12,439 hits.
What we then did was, because we wanted these to be bulletproof matches.
And lawsuit matches, I should add.
Lawsuit proof matches.
We put them up on internal webpages automatically.
50 to a page, 249 pages.
And what the webpages look like is, on the left hand side of the page,
you've got the RSO's mugshot and their name and their details.
And on the right hand side of the page, you've got the photos from their MySpace page.
And the names used and the nicknames used.
And the URL of the MySpace page.
And somebody in my office and me, whoever had time,
manually went through the webpage.
Confirming the photo on the left, confirming the photo on the right.
And if they appeared to be very similar, we then pulled up the MySpace page.
The actual live MySpace page.
And we pulled up the state criminal website page.
For whatever the appropriate state was.
And doing that, the manual processing only took 9 hours.
Of the 29 hours we put into this.
And in 9 hours of comparisons, we got the 100 pages.
Now, subsequently we've gone back.
There's two states' attorneys general that have said to us,
we think what you're doing is terrific.
We frankly don't trust MySpace's representations to us.
Can you do a proof of concept run in our states?
And so we then ran 100.
We then ran all of the RSO's in those two states.
And we produced 100 in one state and 100 in the other.
We have a meeting with the first attorney general's rep,
the head of their criminal investigative division, next Wednesday.
Where we're going to give him 100 RSO's.
Plus all the other matches, just as proof of concept.
And when I get back from out of town, we have another meeting.
So now, if these people that you found on MySpace,
if they are not on parole,
then they've done something wrong in the past that we accept.
But they haven't done anything wrong now.
So what would happen then?
It depends on the state.
Some states, it is a condition of remaining at liberty
that you not have an internet presence.
Now there's one guy that we found,
his actual conviction is for using the internet
to sexually solicit a minor.
And by the way, a 13 year old girl.
This person is from the state of Florida.
I've spoken to the AG's office and to the FDLE,
the state law enforcement people in Florida.
And I've said, do you want this person?
And they said, absolutely.
Because of the nature of his offense,
he is by definition prohibited from having an internet presence.
We immediately faxed the information off to them.
I assume that he is not in a position
to be listening to this radio show tonight.
Go ahead, Bernie.
Steve, aren't the photos and the names and the ages
and maybe the towns of a lot of these registered sex offenders
available online and various websites already?
Absolutely.
And if so, wouldn't it be extremely simple for anyone
to take those images and names and ages
and create MySpace profiles with these registered sex offenders' names
and from an internet cafe or something
and set a lot of these people up?
From an evidentiary standpoint,
how do we know that these are the people who set up these profiles?
Oh, that's the best question so far.
That's a two-part question, although you don't realize it.
The first part of the question is, do people do that sort of thing?
And the answer is yes.
There are people called sex offender vigilantes
that do that sort of thing to try to get the people locked back up.
And the simple proof that that's not happening on a particular page
is if there's regular activity on the page
and there are tons of family photos and wedding photos
and the guy's kids and updates regularly on where he works
and that sort of thing,
things that make it extraordinarily improbable
that some sexual offender vigilante is setting up a web page
to get this guy in trouble.
And that is the case, in fact, in most of these MySpace pages.
They're pretty darn active.
I feel confident that it's not happening.
But you use the magic word which is evidentiary.
And let me tell you,
it is very, very easy for MySpace, willingly or unwillingly,
if they get grabbed by the right law enforcement authority,
to determine who posted this.
And it's a simple matter of what IP address did this come from,
what email address was used for confirmation,
and so on and so forth.
Bernie, it's astounding, it's mind-boggling
how openly these people set up their websites.
Do you know if any of these social networking sites
have in their terms of service agreements?
You know, we have to click to agree to this before you use some site.
Absolutely.
So these registered sex offenders would also potentially be in violation
of the terms of service of these social networking sites?
Absolutely.
Didn't someone recently actually get convicted of a felony
for simply violating the terms of service of one of these sites?
I don't know that you should mention Laurie Drew
in the same breath as going after registered sex offenders.
That was a miserably inappropriate prosecution.
To prosecute somebody criminally for violating MySpace's terms of service
to me is ludicrous.
The most you should be able to do is sue somebody.
That is not the case with a pedophile who sets up a web page on MySpace
and friends young teenagers.
It just goes to show what some prosecutors will stoop to sometimes.
Well, I would be less upset as a practical matter
if they had done that in the case of people who are using MySpace
for genuinely nefarious purposes.
I mean, Laurie Drew is a creep.
No question about it.
Tell us who Laurie Drew is for the sake of the listeners.
Laurie Drew is a middle-aged mom in Missouri
who set up a phony MySpace page
and used it to hound a 13-year-old girl.
And the 13-year-old girl couldn't take the online harassment.
She killed herself.
She thought she was being talked to by a boy, by a 16-year-old boy.
It is a sad, sad story.
It's a disgusting story.
It's a despicable thing that Laurie Drew did,
but not by any stretch of the imagination
should it have been criminally prosecuted.
And the Missouri federal prosecutor refused to take the case.
And then MySpace, which is in California
and has as its director of security enforcement
a retired California FBI agent,
somehow magically got the federal prosecutor
in the Central District of California
to prosecute Laurie Drew all the way out in California
for something that the Missouri U.S. attorney
correctly refused to take.
And how did that case turn out?
She got acquitted of almost everything.
She got convicted of a bogus misdemeanor.
And I have to tell you that
despite the fact that she's a despicable person,
it's such bad law that's been made
and such bad precedent that's been set,
everybody is rallying around her appeal.
Okay, Voltaire, you had a question?
How are registered sex offenders supposed to adapt back into society
if they're not allowed to have web presences,
which are pretty much necessary in a lot of occupations?
Can they have LinkedIn accounts?
You know what?
I don't know a universal answer to that.
It varies state by state.
But frankly, as some of the people in this book in front of me did,
if you rape a 13-year-old girl,
I'm not going to cry if you don't have
all types of employment available to you.
No, you cannot work at a day school.
No, you cannot be in child care.
You can't be a babysitter.
And if that keeps you from getting a job
that you need a web presence, tough.
Well, from some of the examples you were showing me earlier,
a lot of these people are actually enticing young people to be their friends.
Some of this is ridiculous.
I mean, do you want me to page through the book and give you some examples?
Without being too explicit, yes.
That's just the first volume.
Yeah, this is, you know, it's not a funny joke.
It's kind of black humor.
In my office, my investigators are calling this the big book of pedophiles
because we've now got three feet of sexual offenders printed out.
Here is somebody that his crime is child molesting,
and he's got the title of his web page is Daddy, Oh My Goodness.
Here is somebody who is guilty of sexual battery,
and by the way, he is technically a fugitive,
even though he's got a MySpace page listing where he works.
He's a fugitive, but he has a MySpace page.
Yeah, he's a fugitive, sexual offender, failed to register, you know, sexual battery.
Here's another person who, oh, this one I have to be very, very careful how I describe it.
This is somebody, his actual offense, I'll read it to you,
aggravated criminal sexual abuse with bodily harm, two counts, victims age 13.
He's from Illinois, and I'm going to read you extremely cleaned up what his general interest is.
Tearing the lining out of my girlfriend.
He didn't say girlfriend.
Hoo-ha, and he didn't say hoo-ha.
This is one of the most horrible, you know, misogynistic web postings I've ever seen,
and this is, on MySpace, he describes his interest essentially as furiously harming a woman's sexual organs.
What's amazing to me, though, is that people are actually listing their real information here.
I mean, it's just, it seems—
Well, and you can look at the photos, and you can look at the regular activity on this.
Here's somebody, second-degree sexual assault of a child,
and here he is with pictures of little kids on his web page.
Here's another person.
Wasn't there one guy who used his mugshot as his picture on MySpace?
Yes, he's a Texan. You have that in front of you, actually.
He took his Megan's Law website mugshot and used it as his photo,
and under interests, he put your daughter.
Okay. Well, I think we've established that there's a lot of unsavory types out there on MySpace pages.
My question, though, is what makes MySpace worse than, say, Facebook or some of the other—
Well, let me say, I did a—I took the first—yeah, I will pass this book around.
Let me just say that for liability reasons and legal reasons, if you're going to comment,
don't give any significant identifying information.
Yes, they might be listening.
Feel free to grab your laptop and verify all the information there, but don't put it out over the air.
See if you know them already.
Unless you blurt out, my God, that's Bob or something like that.
I don't know that MySpace is worse than Facebook or Friendster.
I will tell you that we took the first 25 that are in that actual book right there,
and we ran them against Facebook, and there were no hits.
We have not run a mass check against Facebook,
and frankly, that is going to be what we do in about a month after we're done with MySpace.
I will tell you that MySpace, if they are doing screening, it is not the level of competence,
not remotely the level of competence and aggressive screening that they are representing.
If you look at the activity dates on those pages,
you will see that some of these people have had active presences for two, three, four, and even five years.
And if we could find the people, this is...
Well, anybody can find the people, right?
Everyone can do this as a hobby.
Let me say that if your listeners walk away with one thing that they understand after this show tonight,
it's that it is not credible that Stephen Rombaum and Polorium Investigations could find,
now we're up to 300, 300 registered sex offenders on MySpace
without access to all of their databases and all of their internal information,
and that MySpace could not have found these people easier, faster, quicker, cheaper.
It's not credible.
If we can find them, MySpace can find them.
And if somebody from MySpace is listening tonight, let me say,
if you can't figure out how to do it, I'm in the book.
I doubt it.
Is it that any site's worse than any other, or that MySpace is more popular than Facebook?
MySpace is absolutely not more popular than Facebook.
Facebook has, even by the statistics that they claim,
even by the statistics claimed by MySpace and Facebook,
Facebook has passed MySpace.
But let me tell you, and it's interesting you bring that up, I'll just throw this out.
As part of our investigation, we tried to determine how many unique active users there actually are on MySpace.
And we discovered that more than half of the number of users that they claim
are either people with duplicate websites or people who have not logged into their page for at least six months.
So the number of eyeballs that MySpace is claiming is exaggerated by at least 100%.
We're speaking with private investigator Steve Ronbaum, who's got quite an expose on MySpace.
No doubt it's going to be all over the news in the days, weeks, months ahead.
Welcoming your phone calls to us here at Off The Hook.
212-209-2900 if you have any questions or comments.
Rob T. Firefly, what do you have?
I'd just like to clarify, you were using, for the info on the sex offenders,
you were just using the publicly available data that anybody can bring up on the web?
Anybody and everybody. Me, you, your grandmother, your sister, your dentist, anyone.
And in fact, that's another critical point.
This data is out there because it was the intent of Megan's Law
to make available to every citizen the name, address, employer, photo, age, and so on of these sex offenders.
This is precisely the reason that Megan's Law was enacted.
So you and I and every other interested party could determine if somebody is a registered sex offender.
All right, Voltaire.
So what crime is MySpace actually guilty of?
How are they any more guilty than YouTube for not screening every single video
and taking out every single copyright violation video?
Well, I think you're mixing grapes with watermelons.
Copyright infringement does not rise to the level of rape of a six-year-old kid.
YouTube not taking all the copies of Casablanca off,
I don't think is as sinister as MySpace not properly screening off child molesters.
The MPAA might disagree.
Well, and I got to tell you, it will be a cold day in Hades before I take a case from the MPAA.
Actually, thanks to the telecom industry, YouTube is not actually liable to take it down
unless the copyright holder informs them that it's there.
And then they have to take it down.
But otherwise, because they're carrying something, but it's user-generated content,
they're not responsible for it.
Yeah, but it's a bad analogy by a factor of 100 at the very least.
I'm agreeing it's a bad analogy, but also, I mean, they're not actually liable to do anything in the first place.
Interesting.
So now, is there anything else that MySpace has been negligent in doing or any other illicit activity?
You know, I wish that I was permitted to discuss the entire investigation.
I have to tell you that even though what we're discussing here tonight is in fact very significant,
I'm not going to say seems significant, it is in fact very significant,
and it is something that is incredibly important to resolve in the near future.
I've got to tell you, it's not the most significant thing that came out in our investigation.
You know, my client is a very tough attorney by the name of Gary Kurtz out in California,
and he sent me in writing an email before this show saying,
here is what you're allowed to talk about.
And he listed a few things, and it says, things that you're not permitted to talk about, colon, everything else.
So at this point, we have prepared an expert witness affidavit,
it's only a draft right now, of more than a thousand pages for Mr. Kurtz,
not including the pedophile stuff.
If the underlying case is not settled,
I think that we're going to file that expert witness affidavit within the next ten days.
And then it'll be public record, and you can have me back here.
Can you tell us what the original issue was involving MySpace,
or why he took an interest in pursuing them, if it was not for the pedophile thing?
Actually, the original case had nothing to do with MySpace.
We investigated an extortion.
We had a client out in the Far East called Blue China Group that was being extorted.
They have a software product, and somebody had sent them an email saying,
we have the source code of your software product, if you don't give us $10,000,
we're going to post it on the internet.
And we were hired to track down this extortionist,
and let's say, remediate the situation.
And we found this person, who was a kid, a teenager,
who, in fact, did not have the source code.
And when we came to his house, he actually fainted.
I mean, literally.
You can see the hidden camera video, and all of a sudden he drops out of the camera,
and you hear a thud.
It's one of the funniest videos ever made.
Is it on YouTube?
It should be, and it may be.
If we file it as part of the public record, it will be on YouTube.
I'm sure somebody will go down to the clerk and rip it to YouTube.
The 21st century is getting really weird.
But when we were in this guy's house, we found,
and he consensually turned his hard drives over to us,
we found on one of the hard drives all of these phishing sites set up,
and the result of them, just one of his efforts,
was 2.1 million MySpace logins and passwords.
57,000 single-spaced pages of MySpace logins and passwords.
We were actually, Mr. Kurtz and I actually had a conversation about,
should we print out these 57,000 pages
and hand them in to the clerk with the covering affidavit?
So the email that we get more than anything else is,
can you help me hack into my boyfriend's Hotmail account because I think he's cheating on me.
You can actually do this now with this information.
Well, 2.1 million boyfriends and girlfriends, yes.
Now, how did he get this information? How was he able to do this?
He actually stole it from somebody who had a legal right to it.
Who has a legal right to that?
Somebody who's consensually given the MySpace logins and passwords
in return for providing an add-on software product.
That sounds incredible.
Go ahead, Bernie, and then we're going to take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
Trust me, look, you know me for 15 years.
You know I don't work for criminals.
That's the very least I can say.
Go ahead, Bernie, quickly.
Steve, do you have any theories as to why MySpace is suing your client, Blue China Group,
for allegedly spamming and phishing their website's users?
I don't have a theory. I know exactly why they're doing it.
Blue China Group, in return for a number of free software products,
was given the MySpace users' logins and passwords by the MySpace users
in return for being able to target market to them.
Now, what is MySpace's sole revenue model?
Advertising to their own users.
Now, here you have MySpace.
And by the way, they have many, many fewer users than they claim.
Fewer functional users.
So here, MySpace, for considerably less money and considerably more efficiency,
and with greater opt-in permission than MySpace itself,
was marketing to MySpace users.
MySpace was losing a ton of money.
The truth is, MySpace, the network that is MySpace,
the user pages that are MySpace, is the Wild West.
MySpace has no control over its own systems and services in many respects.
I mean, this pedophile issue is just one example.
Interesting. Okay, let's see if we can squeeze in some phone calls.
212-209-2900 is our telephone number, and he all disappeared.
What happened there?
We had a bunch of calls, and now they all disappeared.
That's never happened before.
They got scared.
Apparently, they were screened off.
The long arm of MySpace reaches out.
Okay, there's one.
Let's see if we can grab this.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
Is your guest alleging, I missed the very, very beginning, forgive me.
Is your guest alleging that he's taken this data
and actually turned it over to a law enforcement agency,
like, for example, the New York State Division of Parole,
and can you speak to specifically anything that is happening
or has happened with the New York State Division of Parole?
Because I have some first-hand experience with that.
New York State is not one of the AGs that we're in contact with yet.
However, one of the AGs that we are talking to,
we're in contact now with senior law enforcement personnel
from three different attorneys general's offices.
New York is not one of them.
However, one of the AGs, offices that we're talking to,
is a very active member of a panel of 11 attorneys general,
and we are going to be, through this one attorney general,
turning over all of our findings for all 11 states.
The other two AGs' offices are independent,
and we are independently turning over stuff to them.
The first big delivery of this data is next Wednesday.
Okay, thanks for that call.
Let's see if we can squeeze in another one.
Good question, actually.
Yes, we have good listeners.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Thanks for that call.
Yeah, hello?
Yes.
Hi, are we on delay?
It doesn't matter.
Just ask your question.
Yeah, you gave an example of one of the sex offenders online,
and you said that he was convicted of some sort of sexual battery with violence,
and you read from his page.
Twice, convicted twice.
Right.
And you read an example from his page that was, you know, pretty graphic.
And one thing I noticed was it doesn't seem like that guy was trying to fool anybody.
Right, it didn't seem that way.
You know, you're so right.
The one question that I get asked over and over and over by everyone,
including, by the way, my own family when they learned about this case,
when it broke in the papers this week,
is how is it possible that these people use their own real name,
real city and state, and their own real photo?
The answer is, first of all, a lot of these people are pretty disturbed,
and they really don't believe that what they did is wrong.
I've interviewed a lot of child molesters in my career,
and a lot of them think that what they're doing, it's sickening,
but they believe that they are showing genuine love to these children.
Second of all, I have to tell you that a lot of these people clearly have
absolute contempt for MySpace's enforcement and screening procedures,
and I'm not sure that they're wrong.
Well, you have contempt for it, too, apparently.
Let's say that, again, I don't find it credible that I can find these people
and MySpace can't.
All right. Let's take one more phone call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Hello?
Hi. Speak up.
Oh, yes.
Go ahead.
Well, since you have Steve there who did the whole conference,
I thought I would take this opportunity to call and say that
I pledged on October 1st of last year for that 10 DVD program.
Yes. In fact, they're still being shipped,
and if you want to send us an e-mail, oth at 2600.com,
we can verify that we do have your name,
but there are a few that are still going out.
And at no extra charge, you get a personal loan out from me.
Oh, thank you.
Do you have any questions for Steve tonight?
No. Actually, I think what he's doing is wonderful.
Hopefully it will deter some of the future sex offenders out there.
God willing. I agree.
All right. Thanks.
So that was actually a collection call.
Yeah. Absolutely. We get a bunch of those.
One thing I think that we should add to this is just a sense of responsibility
from the people that are using MySpace themselves
to be careful of who they're associating with,
and I think that's also the case with social networking in general.
Oh, my goodness. What an understatement.
I mean, there's almost no excuse for any profile to not be private.
I don't understand why every profile on MySpace is not private.
Why would you give up to strangers?
Well, actually, this was my hope talk,
but why would you consensually give up to strangers
all of this critical information about you, who you are?
Your address, your class schedule, picture of your house, picture of your dog,
all kinds of things, your favorite color.
I don't tell anybody my favorite color.
If it's a big Rottweiler, that's okay.
David, did you have something?
Yeah. If the real information became a liability,
wouldn't they be more likely to lie on their MySpace accounts?
It is not possible if you are the person in possession of the data, which I'm not.
You have to understand, I did this all third-hand,
which makes it even more outrageous that MySpace couldn't do it.
I did this through third parties and through de-anonymizing data.
And for those of you who attended my lecture,
or who, I guess, now buy the DVD,
you will see that I spent about 15 minutes
on how easy it is to de-anonymize data.
It is very, very hard to hide who you are on the net,
to the point where if these people do continue to try to opt to be on MySpace,
they will have to be under a rock, under a cyber rock,
which is, I think, a good place for them to be.
If we drive these people underground, that's a big success, I think.
Well, they're still doing something underground,
but we'll, I guess, see what that is in the future as well.
Well, Steve, thanks for coming by,
and I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this in the weeks ahead,
in the major media and that kind of thing.
And if you want to see Steve's talk or hear Steve's talk,
you can go to www.hope.net.
The audio is available online, the video you can get from us.
It's also posted somewhere.
It's posted all over the place.
It's on YouTube.
I think if you go to video.google.com and you Google
privacy is dead, get over it, or hope, or the last hope, or whatever.
Or R-A-M-B-A-M, that's just how you spell your name.
Correct.
And that will yield you all kinds of information.
Well, Steve, again, thanks for coming and all the talks you've given at the past.
Always a pleasure.
We look forward to hearing where this goes.
You can write to us again at oth at 2600.com,
and that's going to pretty much do it for us here this week.
We'll be back again next week, and guess what we'll be doing next week.
That's right, it's the start of the spring fundraiser.
Yes, the whole month of February.
So we're looking forward to that.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Stay tuned for The Personal Computer Show.
Good night.
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