The Cinema Arts Center and the Long Island Friends of WBAI invite you to a benefit for WBAI entitled
Israel and Palestine, Talk We Must at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington. Sunday,
May 3rd from 930 in the morning to 1 in the afternoon, featuring a film produced by Just
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felt driven to work for peace. There will be a breakfast before the film, a discussion
afterwards with Joel Covell, Diane Killian, Alik Elhanan, and a chance to sing and listen
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And you're listening to 99.5 FM WBAI New York. It's 7pm, time for Off The Hook.
I hope that's understood.
And good evening, the program is Off The Hook. Redhacked here engineering tonight. I'm joined
in the studio by Mike. Hi. Not Kevin. Hello. Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. Dot Rhett. Hello.
Walter. Hey there. Hello again. And on the phone, we have Bernie Estan in Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia. And Emanuel. Greetings from Dayton, Ohio. So how are you
doing out there? How's Ohio? Ohio is pretty much the same as it's always been every time
I've come out here. It's a very friendly place. In fact, so friendly, today I went to a laundromat
to do my laundry, and some completely strange woman, strange in that I didn't know her,
not that she was odd, although what she did was kind of odd. She paid for my dryer for
some reason. She said she just felt like doing it. So that's the kind of homespun good-naturedness
that exists out here in the Midwest. As you go to Ohio, I have a lot of laundry backed
up. I suggest it. They have good dryers. So anyway, yeah, basically, how did I wind up
out here on Kim Il-sung's birthday? Well, I always try to be somewhere special on this
very auspicious occasion, and I believe that people back in New York are sending notes
of greetings to their federal government in various ways. Are people doing that, sending
those little forms in? I haven't sent mine yet, actually. Oh, you should. You should.
Basically, this is part of a strange trip I'm taking that all revolves around getting
service for my smart car, which, as some of you know, is a Canadian car. We didn't
have the right computer codes in the United States, and nobody was able to fix it properly,
so occasionally I have to drive it north of the border and drop it off there. I figured
while I was dropping it off there, I'd make some circuitous driving trips, and rather
than go to Wisconsin and visit a friend by way of the boring route through Toronto and
Ottawa and places like that, I decided to take a very northerly route and go through
such towns as Val d'Or and Capucasin and Wawa and places that we've always dreamed
about but never actually gone to. Now I can say that I've actually gone there, and boy,
they have a lot of snow on the ground still and not a whole lot of people. It was an interesting
trip. It took me actually a full day of driving to do it, but I'm glad I did.
The thing I'm not glad about, though, and I feel like a broken record pointing this
out, going into Canada was the most amazing experience. It took me less than 10 seconds
to be checked out. You hand the guy the passport, and he scans it, and you're in the country.
He welcomes you in, and that's it. Coming into this country once again, I got the royal
treatment. They call it, quote-unquote, a random search, except I always seem to be
the victim of these random searches. As soon as I started to come into the country, they
looked at me like I had three heads, like, what are you doing? Why are you traveling
so much? You work for a magazine. What kind of magazine? What kind of radio station? All
these questions for over an hour. I was interrogated. I was searched. I had to leave the car. I
had to have them search my car while I was not present to see what they were doing.
You know, guys, I'm fed up with this. Every time I come into this country, I get harassed
one way or another, and I don't understand why. Is it because of the way I look, because
of my history? I know I have a file. I know the file says that I was stopped in the past,
but nothing was ever found to be wrong, but because I was stopped in the past, that means
I'm going to get stopped every single time now because they always look this up and see
that I got stopped in the past. I'd like to know what it is they think I'm trying to do
entering my own country from Canada, and if I could just get a straight answer to that,
I'd feel better, but it was really nerve-wracking when you're traveling to have something like
this happen and to have it happen so consistently.
Did you ask them, Emmanuel?
I'm sorry?
Did you ask them that question?
I asked them, is there something I did that's unusual? They said, oh, no, this is just a
random search, and they're just lying to me. They always lie. The only people that told
the truth were the people that did this last time who said, yeah, we're looking at your
file here on the screen, and it says that you were stopped in the past because you had
a credit card with somebody else's name on it, and what I explained to them way back
when that happened was that, you know, anybody can get credit cards under employees' names,
under friends or family, things like that. It's something that the credit card companies
offer, and what we like to do is get all kinds of different names, whether it be Emmanuel
Goldstein, whether it be Laura Palmer, whether it be George W. Bush, things like that. Of
course, I didn't have any names that were that blatantly suspicious-sounding, but they
couldn't understand why somebody would have a credit card with, say, a writer's name or
just an alias of some sort. They figured the only people that would do that would be terrorists
or somebody up to something. I explained this to them. They, you know, apparently finally
got the message, but now I have to explain it every single time, even if I don't have
those credit cards with me, which, by the way, I did have them with me, but I had hidden
them because I thought maybe something like this might happen, and I didn't know where
they were. It turned out they were packed away in a pocket of another pair of pants
I had, but they weren't able to find them. I know they were looking for them. It's just
it's insane. It's an insane waste of time, and I'm sick of it, and I want some justice
somewhere, and I don't know how to get it.
You know, I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I remember when I was in high school,
I knew someone, and I don't even think they were younger than me. They were maybe 14 or
13, and they had gotten a credit card offer in the mail, and they had responded. I don't
know. I guess it wasn't. It was just sent to residents or something because they got
a credit card, and they weren't even 18. They were 13 in the name of Captain Kangaroo.
I thought that was pretty cool, but I mean, so the point is it's really easy to get a
credit card in kind of any name you want. I mean, you'd think that that would get to
the credit card company. They say, well, there's probably not somebody named Captain Kangaroo,
but apparently that wasn't an issue. Maybe they'd seen him on TV. I don't know.
It's just incredible, the suspicion that you're met with coming into this country.
When you say that you work in radio, they want to know exactly what kind of radio station
you work for. They want to know exactly what kind of magazine you work for and what sorts
of things you write. How is any of this relevant to an American citizen coming into his own
country? I mean, even somebody coming from a different country, these are questions that
I just don't see as being relevant in any way, and it's an intimidation tactic because
I found myself shaking at the end of this because I felt nervous. I wasn't up to anything.
I wasn't guilty of anything, but yet I felt like I was, and I think that's exactly where
they want to put you in that position.
Also, as time was going on, I was realizing that a confrontation was quite possible if
they were asking to go into my laptop. I have two laptops with me, and I knew that I was
never going to give them the password to my laptops, and that was going to set up a confrontation,
and who knows how long they would have held me if something like that had happened, or
they might have just seized all my equipment. And you know what? I have to pass that border,
not that particular border, but I have to cross back into Canada because I have to get
the smart car back and I have to drive back into this country again, so I'm not looking
forward to that. It really makes traveling very unpleasant, and it seems like they want
to discourage travel as much as possible. They're looking at my passport saying,
why do you travel so much? How do you answer a question like that? How do you answer a
question, why do you travel so much?
Emanuel?
Yes?
Did you ask them if you had to answer those questions, and did you ask them what would
happen if you refused to answer any questions?
Bernie, you know, it's really, it's not easy to do that kind of thing when it's actually
happening to you, unless you're in a very confident and secure state of mind, and maybe
if you're with a couple of friends, you can be a little cocky like that, but I just wanted
to get out of there. I wasn't going to give up anything. I didn't believe I should
give up, but I was trying to be as polite as possible. I was trying to make this go
as quickly as possible, and, you know, it's really hard to explain unless you've actually
been through it, and the psychological effect it has on you over that amount of time is
just, it's not pleasant at all.
Well, I think that's the idea, right? I mean, they're just going to ask, keep questioning
you with the idea that if you are, I guess, guilty of something, or at least that they
can read that from your reaction, and so if you're an honest person trying to travel
into the country, then these simple questions should be easy to answer, and you won't slip
up on yourself, but I feel like probably more of what they're doing is not asking you questions
to genuinely know the answers, but they want to kind of judge your reaction to the questions
that they ask.
Right. Again, I'd like to know what it is they think I'm up to. What can I possibly
be doing, passing from Canada into the United States, that would warrant this kind of reaction?
The funny thing is, you know, I was in their building for quite some time, and literally
nobody else came through. I was the only person in there.
So you gave them something to do. That's very nice of you.
Yeah, well, I'm glad I was able to occupy their time. Something more positive came out
of this, and this is something that didn't cause suspicion. In fact, I told them about
this, and they didn't care about it at all, but apparently, if you buy ketchup in Canada,
it's made from actual sugar and not high fructose corn syrup, and it tastes a lot better. My
friend in Wisconsin, who I was visiting, asked me to bring some bottles over, and I
did, and now I am intrigued by how many other things taste different in Canada.
All right.
Must be all the sugar cane plantations they have up there.
Yeah, or sugar beets.
Why is that? Is that just because of the fact that we have such a big corn-producing industry
in the U.S. that we generally use high fructose corn syrup? Because that's the same case
with Mexico. I mean, whenever I buy Mexican Coke, it's got sugar in it.
Coca-Cola Red Hacks.
Right, right. Actually, yeah.
I think the reason is Canada had not boycotted, put tariffs on Cuba as the U.S. has, and
that's one of the reasons why everything in the U.S. has high fructose corn syrup, because
that's where we grow. But in Cuba, the majority of sugar came from Cuba before the 1950s,
even in the U.S.
Well, yeah. Okay, so that was an interesting thing. When I go back to Canada, I might get
some more of that sugar-filled ketchup and other things as well. But one thing I did
on this trip, which I've never done before and I've been kind of loathe to do, is actually
make use of the service known as Twitter. And in fact, this is one thing that came in
rather handy, because just as it was clear that I was going to be brought in for further
questioning and searching, I sent a message, a one-word message that said detained. And
of course, that let everybody know that I was in some kind of trouble and that in case
they didn't hear from me for a while, that I was where I was approximately at least or
under whose detention I was being held. So I thought the service was actually quite useful
for that purpose. And I've been updating people on various other aspects of the trip as well.
But has anyone ever used, in this crowd, ever used Twitter to send a message of distress?
No, I just use it to speak about the inanities of my life.
Yeah, that's sort of what kept me away from it for a while, all the people doing that.
You know, it's a huge amount of noise. But it can be interesting.
This is why I don't use Twitter. I have a regular blog I use because the inanities of
my life take up more than a few sentences.
Which, you know, I couldn't blog what was happening to me live. As soon as I hit that
button to send it, they yelled at me. I was in my car still. They said, sir, you cannot
use your cell phone. I said, I'm supposed to know this, for one thing. There are no
signs saying don't use your cell phone. But they were treating me as if I was trying to
get away with something. When I'm in my own car, holding my own phone, apparently I was
under some kind of arrest. I wasn't allowed to use these pieces of technology.
Well, you know, you're not the first person to have used Twitter to send out a signal
like that. There was actually, I think a year, year and a half ago, there was a student or
a photographer who was in another country. He was abroad. And he was arrested by the
police there. And so he tweeted, arrested.
Egypt.
I don't remember where it was. I don't remember the specifics.
I remember this.
Yeah. And so then by sending that out, people who were, I think it was a student. So people
at the school that he was from immediately knew. And, you know, so the school was petitioning
the country for his release, et cetera, et cetera. So kind of this one message he sent
out alerted all the people who were kind of following him that this had happened to him
and was able to trigger kind of a reaction to it, without which nothing might have happened.
They would have arrested him and, you know, he might still be there. Who knows?
Yeah. It can be used for very interesting social reasons, ways of maybe coordinating
demonstrations, ways of sending false information to the authorities. And, of course, it can
be used by all sides. But I thought it was rather comforting that I was able to send
a message to so many people so quickly and at least know that people knew that was happening
to me.
It was a bit vague. I mean, you just posted detained. We were halfway to the pumper sticker
printer.
Yeah. I wish I could have said more. I would have loved to have carried on a whole discourse
about it, but they had other thoughts about that at the border. But speaking about Twitter,
there's a whole thing going on regarding Twitter worms. Now, I don't know how exactly this
happened, but a 17-year-old, apparently his name is Michael Mooney, goes by the handle
of Mikey with two Ys, claims to be the creator and disseminator of the Twitter worms that
basically cause all kinds of mayhem. I think it's 190 compromised accounts with 10,000
infected tweets. And I can't believe I'm saying these words. I don't really know what they
mean, to be honest. But basically, this kid says that he embarked on the weekend, quote
unquote, hacking spree because he was bored.
Now, some of the rogue tweets directed users to stalkdaily.com, which I think is a more
appropriate name for a service like Twitter, Stalk Daily. But that's a Twitter-like messaging
service that he created himself. The worm caused infected accounts to repost tweets
that Mooney appeared to have written. Did any of you guys get copies of these infected
tweets?
I might have seen one or two, but I didn't click on them.
I did not get one, and there's a good reason I didn't get one, because it's one of the
many reasons I don't use Twitter.
Right. It wasn't really a worm in the sense that it did something automatically. I think
when you clicked on it, it somehow tricked you into clicking somewhere else that then
sent the tweet. So it was kind of like there was something hidden behind something else.
I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but that was what I heard anyway.
Well, the folks at Twitter are debating whether or not they're going to take legal action.
I'm not really sure if it's anything other than an unsolicited message that went out
to a bunch of people if there is any legal action to be taken here. But interesting that
I think we'll be seeing more of this kind of thing in the future for sure.
Meanwhile, there's a study that came out. Scientists. This is actually a headline of
a story. Scientists warn of Twitter dangers. Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates
via social networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make
us indifferent to human suffering, according to scientists. New findings show that the
streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain's
moral compass to process and could harm young people's emotional development.
Before the brain can fully digest the anguish and suffering of a story, it is being bombarded
by the next news bulletin or the latest Twitter update, according to a University of Southern
California study. If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience
emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for
your morality.
I'm sorry. Hasn't the mainstream media already numbed us to morality and human suffering?
You'd think so, but apparently this is taking it a step further and making it so rapid-fire,
so quick. Although, to be honest, I haven't seen very many tweets that convey human suffering.
Human suffering takes place on my side when I read them.
Hey, I posted about my lunch today. If that's not suffering, I don't know what is.
See, that's the thing. I'll post about an adventure I'm having. I'll post about something
that's a challenge or a weird event. But your lunch? Are people really interested in what
you had for lunch?
You know, now it's Twitter. Before that, it was like the web in general or MySpace.
Before that, it was America Online. I think the media just has the same story with blanks
and the key places that they fill in with whatever the newest thing is.
Well, before that, it was television, then radio.
Yeah, and rock and roll.
And probably, you know, at some point, the telegraph was going to cause moral decay.
It actually goes all the way back to Aristotle. Aristotle, one of his most famous quotes is,
I forget exactly what it was, but he's basically saying that since kids were becoming so literate,
they weren't going to memorize anything and they were going to become stupid.
You know, maybe the media is just scared that the disinformation or information is now in
the hands of the people again. I mean, if you think about it, one thing that happened,
I know there was an earthquake in California a little while ago, and that was on Twitter
long before it was on any major news source. You know, anyone in California who felt it
just tweeted earthquake.
The same thing happened with the Turkish plane crash in Europe.
The photos, the first photos that were out were off of Twitter photos.
Right.
So, yeah, I guess it's a way that the media is handed to individual people.
Of course, it could also be used to spread fake information as well.
I don't know how you're able to verify that something actually is happening.
What if a bunch of people in California just say earthquake on their Twitter accounts?
We're all going to think there's an earthquake that's happening.
Right, and the mainstream media will probably report it then, that there's an earthquake
happening because they don't really, you know, fact check too well.
That is certainly true. We've learned that many, many times.
Now, there's another interesting story going around that I've been following
concerning Amazon. Now, there was a system error that caused Amazon to remove
a number of gay, lesbian-themed books from its sales charts.
And I think at first they were saying that it was caused by, quote-unquote, hackers
or something similar outside the source of some kind.
And now I think they're saying it was some kind of a glitch.
Do we have any more information about what they did?
Essentially the other way around. First they were saying that it was a policy change
and then they end up saying it was a glitch.
And then they start to blame it on hackers.
And there's still no consensus yet on what exactly happened.
Or they said it was one hacker.
I think some guy, I forget the name of the person, claimed responsibility
but I don't know if there's any validity to that.
Have they reversed the changes yet or is it still...
I'm not sure.
I think they reversed one or two of the affected books without touching the rest
or something like that.
According to Amazon spokesman Patty Smith,
oh, that's where she wound up.
How about that?
Basically she said the glitch was fixed but she didn't want to elaborate.
She said this was an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error
for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.
It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay and lesbian-themed titles.
In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories
such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica.
And the problem didn't only impact books just in the United States but globally.
What exactly did it do?
Did fake books not get listed or something?
Right, so if you searched, a lot of books weren't appearing in the search index.
So, for example, if on Saturday or Sunday you searched for the word homosexuality,
the only books you would get were about curing it.
Great!
And what's interesting about this, and this seems to be a running theme this week,
but this was actually, a majority of the uproar was on Twitter.
So one of the major trends or terms on Twitter over the weekend was Amazon fail.
Yes, pound Amazon fail.
Right.
That's a hashtag.
How would you use that in Twitter, that particular phrase?
What?
The pound Amazon fail which is being referred to here.
If you posted to something, if you put that in your tweet, would it go someplace?
I mean, it doesn't have to go to a specific place.
Basically, all it is, is it makes kind of like a unique searchable term,
so that if I wanted to find all the things related to that,
I could type pound Amazon fail into the Twitter search.
So hashtags are generally used as kind of search terms,
or for kind of grouping tweets by topic.
Okay, and there's also caused quite an uproar on Facebook as well.
And of course, many times Facebook and Twitter are linked together.
So yeah, that was kind of interesting as well.
Emmanuel?
Yes, go ahead.
I just wanted to add a couple things.
As you did point out, Amazon initially, or as I think Doug Redd pointed out,
Amazon initially said that this was an effort.
One blogger I read posted a response from Amazon which was quoted as saying that
not all of their, all the books they sell are suitable for all readers,
and that they were going to start making certain titles on subjects
that they thought were not suitable to all readers available
only by going to a special section on Amazon.
But there was no such section for people to go to at that point, and there still isn't.
So that's a great concern.
Another bigger concern is that Amazon has been effectively obtaining
exclusive online rights for republishing online a lot of books
that might not be available.
Actually, you know what?
I'm sorry, I'm misspeaking.
I'm talking about Google, I think.
So pardon me.
I was mixing up my major information collectors.
But the bottom line is that Amazon looks like it got caught trying to censor
some of the availability of certain titles,
and I think this is backfiring due to the rapid communications
online through Twitter and Facebook and other mediums.
This was a big topic.
I was listening to a network known as OutQ Radio,
which is a gay and lesbian themed radio network
that I get on my XM radio.
I have XM radio in my car.
I've never used XM before either.
So this rental car I got from Canada, I've been driving all around.
I've tuned to just about every station for a little bit.
For the most part, I'm very unimpressed with XM slash Sirius
because basically it's not really radio.
It's kind of like disembodied voices in between musical tracks.
But occasionally, occasionally you get something that does resemble radio,
and OutQ is one of those stations,
where it is just a satellite service.
But most of the time when driving in foreign countries or in strange states,
it's most interesting to tune to the non-commercial radio stations.
You won't find anything like WBAI.
You will find a lot of college stations and all kinds of alternative programming.
And that's the kind of thing you don't hear on satellite radio.
You don't get that local perspective.
But in this particular case, I was listening to talk about this very story
on that satellite network.
A couple other things, too, that were interesting.
There's a talk network called America Right.
Of course, that's all about right-wing talk radio hosts.
And there actually is a network called America Left.
It's not very leftist, but they do have different viewpoints
that you might not hear on talk radio normally.
Yeah, I think America Left is just a rebroadcast of Air America.
No, it's not.
Air America does have some of the same programming,
but it's not completely the same.
There is no Pacifica radio on there, unfortunately.
I think Pacifica would do well to have a channel on that satellite service.
So people in various parts of the country can also get it as well.
Okay, have you guys heard the name Bob Quick?
Does that mean anything to you?
Sounds like a superhero.
Well, he's no superhero in England.
He's got egg on his face.
Yes, I've heard of him.
Yeah, Bob Quick is the guy that unfortunately leaked secret information
because he was carrying this document during a press conference.
He was an assistant police commissioner for counterterrorism.
He was holding this document as he was talking about actions they were taking.
On this secret document that photographers were able to clearly see,
it was marked secret and it carried an outline about an ongoing counterterrorism operation
that listed the names of the people that had not yet been raided.
So what they had to do was they had to quickly raid these people before word got out.
I thought it was interesting that it was just a matter of fact that photographers
were just going to zoom in on this and then report the names.
Of course, he had to resign.
Very embarrassed that this kind of thing happened.
But it goes to show, you know, with camera technology the way it is today,
things can be zoomed in on very easily and what you think might be secret
won't stay secret very long.
So at least he resigned quickly.
I'm sorry, Mike, what?
At least he resigned quickly.
He resigned pretty quickly.
All right, lived up to his name.
Yes, Bernie.
Yeah, what was happening is he was getting out of his car
right in front of the Prime Minister's house on Downing Street.
He was getting out of his car and he had these classified documents under his arm.
They weren't in a briefcase.
They were just fully exposed.
And that's what happened.
There were photographers right across the street taking pictures of him.
They follow him around.
All the other high-ranking officials, they follow him around.
And so they didn't even realize, the photographers, that this was a classified document
until, you know, you look carefully and it said secret at the top of it.
So you would think that you would want to put classified documents in a briefcase
if you're going to carry them around in public.
Bernie, always use a cover sheet.
You know, that's what they're for.
He could have had used some great disinformation.
It was a great opportunity for him to have something that would be completely misleading
to the terrorists under his arm.
And then they could have had this whole disinformation campaign saying,
Oh, we didn't mean to expose this and whatever, you know.
But they totally blew that opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely.
Never underestimate the power of a telephoto lens.
These days, almost anybody can do this.
Another kind of disturbing story that came out of Reuters.
Cyber spies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid
and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system.
That's according to the Wall Street Journal last Wednesday.
The spies came from China, Russia, and other countries
and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system
and its controls.
Now, I can't for the life of me understand
what the electrical power grid is doing on the Internet.
I'm assuming that's how they got in.
It's not.
Sorry?
It's not on the Internet.
There's all these really strict regulations and controls
that North American power utilities have to make sure
that their systems are not online.
These rules have been in place for years and years.
And they're not supposed to be online.
And I really question the veracity of the story
because the timing of it was just prior to the Obama administration
figuring out where they were going to allocate cybersecurity money
to the tunes of billions of dollars.
And the sole source for this story turns out to have been
an unnamed former intelligence official.
You know where the former intelligence officials go.
They work in private industry after they get out of the agency.
So this is really a bogus story, I think.
And it's also crazy to think that if Russia and China
had the ability to penetrate our electrical grid and control it,
wouldn't they also have the ability to mask where these controls were coming from,
like use a proxy server in another country?
It just defies logic.
You would think so.
What impressed me about that story was that it used the word cyber spies
and not hackers anywhere.
But that's a small victory, I guess.
Now, there's also another very important news story
that came out this week, and that was the loosening of restrictions
concerning Cuba, particularly with regards to communication issues.
Bernie, how significant is this development?
I think it's really significant.
A lot of people were hoping the embargo would be lifted altogether.
But I think for political reasons, the Obama administration can't do that
all in one fell swoop.
But what this is, is basically the Obama administration has said that,
among other things, telecommunications carriers, cellular carriers,
and wireline carriers may now make agreements with the Cuban government,
which has their own carriers there, to provide direct phone service
to Cuba, to and from Cuba, which has not really existed on a large scale
for decades.
Now, U.S. cellular carriers can establish roaming agreements in Cuba.
So if Americans travel to Cuba, like if you're an average person,
you still can't go to Cuba legally.
But if you have a family in Cuba, you can go there and visit
and give them some money.
But you could use your American cell phone there
if an American carrier makes an agreement with the Cuban government.
Whether the Cuban government is going to let them make those roaming agreements,
we don't know.
But we're also now allowed to, our carriers can lay fiber-optic cables to Cuba
and establish long-distance links and provide Internet connectivity.
But again, it's all up to the Cuban government,
whether they want to allow American carriers
to provide telecommunications services to Cuban citizens.
But I think that's a big step.
And unlike Bush's move to allow American cell phones to be shipped to Cuba,
that was an empty move because those phones wouldn't work anyway
because the American cell phones can't work on the Cuban cell phone carriers.
So this actually has some teeth in it,
and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
Well, are there less restrictions now on travel to Cuba
and communication with Cuba than there were, say, under Clinton?
Well, in terms of communication, there might be fewer restrictions.
But in terms of travel, there's definitely more restrictions
than there were, say, at the beginning of the century.
Right now what Obama did is allowed people with family in Cuba
to go and visit their family on an unlimited basis,
whereas under Bush it was limited to once every three years or so.
But there were previously categories of either fully hosted travel,
which meant someone from another country paid for your trip,
or there was something called a person-to-person educational exchange,
which meant that delegations from the states could go to Cuba
and interact with Cubans and see that the other side
was actually consisted of normal people.
And neither of those two categories has been restored by Obama.
I have to wonder why more wasn't done,
why a complete lifting of travel restrictions.
Why should Americans be told it's illegal for them to go someplace,
especially someplace that's so close?
It's quite warm, actually.
Yeah, it's very warm, in fact.
I'm very surprised by that.
I felt if there was going to be a step, it would be a bigger step than this.
I agree it is a significant technological step,
but is it really that different than what existed beforehand, before Bush?
Well, a lifting of the entire embargo would require a vote by Congress.
It's apparently not something the president could do on his own.
But the president certainly could do and did not do more than he did.
We have this letter.
And, of course, you can write letters to us by simply emailing OTH at 2600.com.
We love to hear from our listeners.
And here's one letter in particular concerning last week's show.
If you remember, last week we got into a bit of a rant about the state of radio.
We do that occasionally.
We had Laszlo on, and we were talking about our April Fool's show
where we went country for about 20 minutes or so, fooled a lot of people, actually.
And it turns out there are a bunch of stations called Country 99.5 FM.
I didn't know about that.
Anyway, this is a listener writing and saying,
I'm just listening to the podcast of last night's show, which was April 8th.
And the radio station rant is ringing many bells with what we have here in the U.K. right now.
30 years ago, most of the U.K. didn't have local radio stations serving towns and cities.
Over the years, many launched, some failed, but a few carried on,
bearing in mind the U.K. isn't like the U.S. with large metropolitan areas,
without a lot in between.
We have towns and cities that are much closer together,
so each local station overlapped into other areas.
Then along came GWR and GCAP and other corporations.
They bought up stations, networked them locally, which was just about bearable.
Then all hell happened.
Now a large chunk of the legacy stations are all owned by the same company,
and they're now rebranding all the stations with the same name, known as HEART.
So what was SGR in one area, Invicta Radio in another,
Hurrid Radio in yet another are all called HEART now,
plus they're networking everything except breakfast and drive shows,
which basically means all the local stations are now Quasi-National instead.
It's so bad that when I go visit my parents on a weekend,
at one point on the journey I can get a HEART station playing the exact same thing
on six different frequencies.
Unbelievable. It's a total waste of spectrum.
Yet still the corporations merge and rebrand,
then have the gall to complain that they have to save costs because nobody's advertising.
What they haven't grasped is that nobody's advertising
because nobody listens to generic clone crap
and switches to the low-power community stations, pirates, or BBC Nationals.
As it stands now, even some of the smaller, still independent stations
are moving to automation between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.,
but don't have anyone monitoring the output.
I've lost count of the times when I've left work late,
been flicking through the stations, and found nothing but silence with intermittent beeps
because the play-out systems crashed,
leaving the satellite feed for the news bulletin playing,
or in one case, the link between a studio and transmitter had crashed
and the transmitter was just looping the last few milliseconds of audio received,
making the broadcast sound like a stuck CD.
Maybe this recession will kill off the idiot companies who run stations like that,
but I doubt it, signed Dave from the UK.
And Dave, yes, those sentiments really ring true,
and it's incredible how unpersonalized radio has become.
I've complained about this XM radio I'm listening to in my car,
and, yeah, that's not real radio.
But you know what?
What's happening on commercial radio also is not real radio.
You don't have human beings running it anymore.
It's all computer-operated from foreign cities,
and by foreign I mean just out of the local area, remote city, someplace else.
There's no radio involved in this.
It's just basically computers playing music with disembodied voices.
You know, I think in New York we see a little bit less of that,
only because of the fact that there's enough, I guess, demand here
that they would want to have local programming.
But you do find stations that could be sourced from anywhere.
I mean, there are ones that just play music all the time,
and you don't know where it's coming from.
They don't say anything ever, so.
Absolutely, and you do see that in New York.
There are a lot of stations here that you might think are live,
that you might think have actual people, but they don't.
They're computerized, or the people aren't anywhere near New York.
And while I was driving, I came across several stations that did this.
And it's really weird, because the stations don't make any attempt
to hide the fact that they're computer-run.
In fact, they have those computer, like Steve Hawking-type voices,
reading the weather.
And it's obvious there's no person anywhere near the radio station.
They just play music and have a generic voice announce what station it is.
And when anything local happens, whether it's traffic or weather,
it's a really badly-sounding, computer-generated voice.
So, yeah, real radio is few and far between in many places.
It's a sad thing.
From one sad thing to another, and speaking of the Obama administration,
we have this story.
This story has kind of surprised a lot of people.
I'm reading from an Electronic Frontier Foundation release here.
The Obama administration has embraced Bush's position on warrantless wiretapping
and goes one step further than the previous administration.
In a motion to dismiss Juul v. NSA, the Obama administration's Department of Justice
made two deeply troubling arguments.
First, they argued exactly as the Bush administration did on countless occasions
that the state secret's privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand.
They asserted that simply allowing the case to continue
would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.
As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation
without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.
And second, the Department of Justice claimed that the U.S. government
is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying
because the USA Patriot Act renders the U.S. immune from suit
because under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws,
the Wiretap Act and the Historic Communications Act,
this is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented.
No one, not the White House, not the Justice Department,
not any member of Congress, and not the Bush administration,
has ever interpreted the law this way.
And according to the EFF, this is not change we can believe in.
This is change for the worse.
Joining us on the phone is senior staff attorney Kurt Opsel.
Kurt, are you with us?
Yes, pleasure to be here.
Welcome.
It's kind of shocking to read something like this.
I know there was a similar news story a couple of months ago,
and a bunch of us thought at the time it was just a procedural thing,
that this was something that would soon be rectified.
But this seems a lot more troubling.
How do you read what the Obama administration is actually doing here?
Well, you know, like you, when some of the initial signs came out
that they were filing legal papers similar to the Bush administration,
there was a question, you know,
is this something which is a vestige of the prior administration,
or is this something that is really coming from the new Obama administration?
And the answer appears to be yes, it's coming from the new Obama administration.
Well, that's just very surprising to me,
because it seems to fly in the face of just about everything that Obama himself has said.
Has he actually himself come forward and said anything on this particular issue?
Well, his spokesperson, Robert Gibbs, the press secretary,
was asked about this during a White House press conference.
You know, the question was,
does the president support the Justice Department's position in that case,
referring to the Juul case?
And Mr. Gibbs' answer was yes, absolutely.
And did you get the impression that he actually was aware of what was being asked in that question?
Well, I mean, we have to take them for what they say.
You know, he says, I mean, to continue, he says,
obviously these are programs that have been debated and discussed,
but the president does support that viewpoint.
The next question, before he was elected,
the president said the Bush administration had abused the state's secret privilege.
Has he changed his mind?
And they said the answer is no.
And what the Obama administration's position has been is that they were going to review the state secret privilege assertions,
but now they're telling us that they have reviewed it and they wish to use it here.
And what is sort of somewhat astonishing about this is, you know,
the root of the state secret privilege is the notion of, you know, is this a secret?
And the secret that they are claiming to need to protect is whether or not AT&T,
through AT&T and through the government, they spied on Americans.
And this has been front-page news in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal.
It's been the subject of books.
It's been on television.
It's not much of a secret anymore.
Zach, go ahead.
I have a question.
Actually, during the nomination process last year, when Obama was running,
he ended up backtracking on opposing telecom immunity,
or he ended up supporting telecom immunity, even after promising not to.
So after that, is the EFF really surprised that Obama has taken this strong of a position
in favor of the, I guess, like defending the spying program?
Well, you know, we were very excited back during the nomination process
when Obama came out strongly against telecom immunity
and said he would support a filibuster of telecom immunity.
Then as the campaign season progressed, he said that while he doesn't support telecom immunity,
that nevertheless he was going to vote for the bill that contained immunity,
asserting at the time that that was what he thought was the best deal that was possible
and that he had to support the bill.
So, I mean, there's been a gradual shift over time.
But really it's not so much surprise or lack of surprise.
It's disappointment.
You know, he campaigned on a promise of change, and we're not seeing the change here.
So I'm curious what happens next in the case.
Do you think you'll have any success overriding this claim of state secrets privilege,
or do you think it's pretty much over?
Oh, I am very hopeful that we will prevail.
You know, we're certainly going to do the best that we can.
But, you know, it's worth noting that the similar state secret claim was made in the Hepton case,
which was our case against telecoms directly, the case that led to telecom immunity.
And the government did not prevail on its state secret privilege claim there,
which was one of the impetuses in having to go back to Congress and try and get a special law
to try and get the courts out of that case.
So we're hopeful that the judge, and it's the same judge, will rule in the same way.
I know there's a prevailing feeling among many of us that one politician is pretty much the same as another
and that you can never really have effective change with the current crop of candidates.
But is there any way you can interpret what's going on here that is not overly cynical,
that maybe there is something we're not seeing here, some kind of strategy that Obama is up to
or his administration is up to where he's not just simply continuing the exact same policies of George W. Bush?
Because personally for me, it just seems astounding that someone would even try to do that,
let alone succeed in doing it.
Well, you know why?
You always have hope that people will change and will keep to their campaign positions
and will do the things that you had hoped for previously.
But the proof is really in the pudding, as it were.
You know, days after Obama got into office, he signed some executive orders
talking about transparency and openness in government.
He said that there would be a review of the use of the state's secret privilege.
These things were all very good.
It seemed like that was a step in the right direction.
But it's one thing to announce from the White House policies, even if they are good policies,
but you also have to follow through and have those policies reflected in the legal papers.
What about the state of the spying itself?
Is that still going to be going on, spying on people without warrants?
Well, you know, in January of 2007, the Bush administration came forth and said,
we are now putting the so-called terrorist surveillance program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
But when asked about that, clarifying that at a White House press conference,
they said, no, no, the program is continuing as it was.
We're just going through a different process.
They called it a creative and innovative process to go through the court.
That satisfied them for a while.
Then apparently the court issued a ruling, a ruling that is still secret, that made them unhappy.
And that led to the pressure for the Protect America Act,
and subsequently the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment Act of last year.
So there's been some strong indication that the program is continuing
and they're just sort of shifting around their arguments as to why it's lawful.
And there have been no indications that the program has stopped.
That's highly unusual, I think, that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would issue a ruling the government doesn't like.
It almost never happens.
Well, it doesn't.
I mean, it has denied less than a dozen cases, and it's tens of thousands of cases that it's had.
So it is very much a pro-government court.
It's ex parte, meaning that only one side gets to present its case and only one side appeals.
And the funny thing about that is that they apparently lost a case there,
but instead of appealing that case, they decided to go ask for the Protect America Act,
which suggests that they didn't think that the court was wrong under the law.
Well, Kurt, how can we continue to force the issue?
What can listeners do?
Well, certainly I would encourage all listeners to go to our website, getmoreinformation at EFF.org.
If they're inclined, you can become a member and get updates through our newsletter.
That's a helpful thing.
As far as political action, there's the State Secret Act,
a bill that is winding its way through Congress which is designed to reform the state secret privilege.
As a candidate, Obama suggested that he was in favor of that bill.
We'll see if that still remains the case now that he's in office.
But there has been a little bit of momentum there that has increased
after these recent aggressive uses of state secret privilege.
Well, speaking personally, I would like to see some kind of a demand to hear from his own words,
on this subject.
I'd like to see what Barack Obama has to say about why he's taking this stance
or why his administration is taking this stance.
It boggles my mind that such a radically different practice from what he was preaching
would be happening now.
I just would like to not hear from his spokesman, not hear from the newspapers,
but actually hear him try and justify this because it's really unbelievable.
Good. It's very disappointing.
I just wanted to ask a question or maybe point something out that
if we try to just go back to the basics on this, isn't this about,
and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this really about the Constitution
and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution which protects Americans
against unreasonable surges and seizures?
That is a search of our, in this case, our phone calls,
without a warrant issued by a judge after seeing an affidavit of probable cause
as to what is being searched for.
Isn't that what this is really all about?
And isn't this just a blatant violation of our constitutional rights
under the Fourth Amendment?
Absolutely. We are pressing Fourth Amendment claims here,
and the reason that this actually is so critical is that this harkens back
to some of the very reasons that led to the revolution, the break from England,
was because in revolutionary times the king would use these broad general warrants
which would give the Red Coats the right to go through people's stuff
without any individualized suspicion, without any probable cause,
and this really upset the American colonists
and was one of the contributing factors that led to the revolution.
And by instituting a program by which people are sifting through
all these communications and these call detail records
without any individualized suspicion, but sifting through it just to see
what they can find, is very similar to the general warrants
that were a root cause of the creation of our country.
I'd like to ask if other organizations are also taking action
in addition to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Well, in the Telcom case, we are working closely with the American Civil Liberties Union,
who is a co-lead counsel on that set of cases.
And other organizations have been interested in the state secret privilege,
the Center for Democracy and Technology, Center for National Security Studies.
This is an issue that concerns a lot of people.
And again, the website www.eff.org is how people can get involved
in this particular case and learn more.
There's also, I believe tomorrow, sort of unrelated,
but there might be some more legal memos released by the Obama administration
concerning the CIA's illegal torture program.
Do you see that as a positive thing?
Or do you think they might backtrack on that as well?
Well, it remains to be seen.
They released several memos at the beginning of March.
That was very informative.
I was glad that they released those memos.
In particular, the memo that, while not specifically focused on the wiretapping program,
asserted that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to domestic military operations.
And, of course, you'll note that the NSA is part of the Department of Defense.
So some interesting theories that were coming out of the Bush administration.
So I'm eager to see these memos, even though they will be torture-related memos.
In the past, we've received important clues about the overall overreaching of executive power,
and through references and footnotes and the types of arguments they've raised in the torture context,
it has helped inform the reading public just how overbroad and overreaching they were.
All right.
Kurt Altshul from Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Let me ask you one final question.
Do you have any kind of theory as to what might have happened here?
Was it maybe a case of someone realizing that, hey, this is a lot of power.
We shouldn't just give it up.
It's just maybe a lot of people corrupting somebody who appeared to be idealistic.
It's just something that's inevitable whenever anybody is in power.
Well, it is certainly a feature of our political history is that members of Congress,
when in Congress, talk about restraining the executive power
and talk about the abuses of the other party when the other party has that power.
But when they get into the executive, sometimes that shifts around.
What we try and do at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is we're trying to create a future that's going to be worth living in,
that's going to be free from warrantless surveillance without Big Brother,
and we have to keep on pushing on that point regardless of who's in power.
Are there genuine fighters for transparency inside the Obama administration?
Or is it just that the Obama administration, when it first came into power, was giving goodies out just to appease people?
When the Obama administration came to power, it issued some new orders on transparency,
and we have some ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation that has been seeking records about the Bush administration
and some activities there.
So we were hopeful that this would mean that they would loosen up
and release a few more of these documents that we've been fighting for,
but so far that really hasn't happened.
Well, I think it's our obligation, both as civil libertarians and as citizens,
to remind them when they fail us.
And I think this is the first indication that they are failing us.
So hopefully your actions over at EFF and hopefully talking about it on the radio,
and hopefully a lot of other people getting outraged by this, will have an effect.
Do you think it's a possibility, at least under this administration?
Well, I think the more the people do, the better it is to let the administration know that this is an important issue.
I mean, I was very gratified back during the campaign season
when the largest group on my barackobama.com campaign website
was a group dedicated to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act issues.
So I think just let the administration know, or let the candidate know, the administration,
that this is an important issue.
This is not something that you can just blow over and hope that people forget,
because people care about this.
They care about what kind of society that we're building
and what kind of rule of law we're going to have.
Okay. Well, it's time to raise our voices, obviously.
Kurt, also, thanks so much for joining us tonight on Off the Hook.
And, folks, please support EFF, www.eff.org.
Make sizable donations so they can continue fighting for our rights.
And thanks for all you've done over the years.
Thank you very much.
All right. I guess that's going to just about do it for our show tonight.
I'll be over at Nauticon.
Bernie, I believe you'll be at Nauticon in Cleveland this weekend as well?
Yes. Rob and I and Leo are heading out there tomorrow afternoon.
Now, Kevin, are you going to be there as well?
I will be there.
All right. So we're going to have fun in Cleveland.
All right.
All right. Good night, everyone.
Good night.
Good night.
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