That's the situation we're living now in East Haven, without even having a law, we're living
that situation here.
Melinda Tujus, Free Speech Radio News, East Haven, Connecticut.
And that wraps up today's program.
This is Free Speech Radio News.
Thanks for listening.
In New York, I'm Dorian Marina.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI New York.
The time is just about 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
I hope that's understood.
Bundle it up!
We'll be right back.
And
you're listening to Radio Station WBAI, New York, 
Sorry about that. Can you hear me? Yeah, you're fine. Okay, yeah, these badges are
designed to be hackable, and there will be places set up at the Hoop conference
you can actually hack your own badge, you can plug it in to a computer,
and you can make it do all kinds of things. There's blinking lights on it, there's red lights
and green lights, and there's a radio on it that talks to the other badges
and talks to all the transponders in the room, and it's pretty amazing
And the applications that people are going to be able to write with this API that was
announced today, it's going to be really interesting to see what people come up with.
There's some amazing stuff came up with two years ago at The Last Hope, but now we've
got a much bigger head start and people have months to work on some amazing apps.
Yeah, I just wanted to say one more thing about the API.
It's kind of interesting because here you're taking a real-world thing, which is people
moving around the conference, and making it an API that people can access and kind of
use that to, I don't know, invade their privacy or whatever.
But this actually mirrors reality because you have a lot of these APIs out there now,
like the Facebook API and the Foursquare API and things like that, that basically let you
do the same thing.
And I don't know how many people realize that to be the case.
But anyway, that'll be interesting to see, given this kind of data, what people will
do with it.
And again, for more information, go to amd.hope.net and if you want to become part of the project,
write to amd at hope.net.
And it's going to be amazing and fabulous and all that kind of thing.
Go to www.hope.net for more information on the HOPE Conference.
And one other announcement.
This is something involving Club Mate, the German hacker drink that we somehow distribute
throughout the country.
We're having a special Seattle Club Mate day, if there are Seattle listeners out there.
Yes, the first weekend of June, you can have, it won't be the 2600 van, it'll be a 2600
vehicle, but not the 2600 van.
It can't make it all the way out to Seattle.
But you will have an official vehicle come and bring a 20-bottle case to your home or
business during that first weekend of June.
All you got to do is contact the folks at the, what's the website, club-mate.us, is
that?
Yeah, that's right.
Well, if you go to the story on 2600.com that talks about this, all the links are there
and you can email the appropriate people.
But it's a significant savings over the regular shipping cost to have somebody just give it
to you there.
Did I, club-mate.us, I think I agreed.
Club-mate.us.
The dash is optional.
Oh, okay.
So we have it without the dash.
With or without the dash, but you have to say .us, not whatever I agreed to before.
So it's spelled C-L-U-B-M-A-T-E.
Okay, so that's enough with the exciting announcements.
Now we have some exciting stuff to share with you, things from the past.
We're offering tonight, as part of our special WBAI fundraiser, is an archive, an archive
of Off the Hook, because Off the Hook has been here for all kinds of historical moments.
And the one we're about to play right now is one of the more historical ones that happened
in this world.
It's when war was about to break out.
Which war, you ask?
Oh yes, there are many.
Things always seem to happen during the time we're on the air, and when President George
W. Bush made the deadline announcement for Saddam Hussein to do something, one thing
or another, the hour was ticking down to the very end of our show.
So war could have begun at the very minute that our show ended that night.
So this is an excerpt from the show, I believe it's March 19th, 2003.
And I believe war started about three days later, so it didn't really happen that night.
But everybody was talking about it, it was on everyone's mind, and it just goes to show
the kinds of things that can happen on the air that don't necessarily have to do with
computers and technology, but they still concern us nonetheless.
This is yours for a pledge of $75, and when I say this, I mean every single show that
we've done over the years, from 1988 to the end of 2009, in full DVD quality, or audio
quality, full on-air quality, I guess is the way to say that.
212-209-2950, pledge of $75 gets you that.
And every pledge of $35 and above gets you a brand new off-the-hook t-shirt in the size
of your choice.
And we have other things to offer as well, but if you're interested in this, give us
a call now.
212-209-2950, or let's go back to 2003.
And a good evening to everybody on this auspicious occasion of, it's kind of bizarre how things
always seem to happen during our program, but this is actually it.
The much-hyped countdown to war, well, this is the final hour when our show is over, could
very well be when war officially begins, might even begin before then.
We're monitoring the situation, and at this point we really have to give you some important
information as to just what's going to be happening here at the radio station.
Obviously things are about to hit the fan in one way or another.
We don't know exactly how things are going to go.
Nobody does.
But one thing that is vital to this community, to the New York area, to all the people who
are listening to us on the internet, it's important for us to have a voice to be able
to broadcast whatever information we're able to obtain, whatever news is not being broadcast
by the mainstream media.
And that's why, for the foreseeable future at least, the main focus of this program,
as well as many others on this radio station, is going to be the military action that is
taking place, how that affects us back here at home, how that affects people over there.
And we're just going to try and shed our particular unique light on events as they unfold.
And we invite our listeners, obviously, to do the same as well.
There's quite a lot of changes going on right before our very eyes.
And I'd say not one of them is a good change.
It's kind of unbelievable.
Just what's going on in New York right now, the sense of occupation that's taking place.
Generally in wars, traditionally, wars have been fought over borders where people throw
things back and forth at each other.
But that's not the case here.
We have some bizarre, distorted view of war that allows us to go someplace else and bomb
another country to smithereens, and nothing happens to us except our own paranoid delusions
of what they might do.
And those paranoid delusions of what they might do have led to a virtual military siege
of the city here.
Last night I was walking around in the Penn Station area.
I was actually in the subway system, not in Penn Station.
And I bumped into a guy.
I always bump into people.
It happens on the subway.
Except this guy had a goddamn machine gun on him.
Yeah.
It was one of these military people.
I guess they're National Guard.
But you know what?
I don't care what you call them.
They're soldiers and they're occupying the city.
And they have machine guns.
And I don't know what in God's name somebody with a machine gun is going to be able to
do to prevent somebody from blowing themselves up or crashing planes into buildings.
I remember when this first started a couple of years ago, we were talking about the National
Guard in Penn Station and various other places.
And how, you know, it was just a show of strength, of force, of something like that.
And that there's nothing to worry about.
These people don't even have guns.
Well, that's certainly changed.
It's changed a lot.
There's people walking around now with machine guns.
And you know, I don't know what to do with these people.
What to make of them.
You know, do you look into their eyes?
Do you look away?
Do you, you know, say excuse me when you bump into them?
Do you like try like the plague not to bump into them?
I mean, has anyone out there had any kind of encounter with these people?
You know, it's really frightening.
And then walking down Wall Street on the way to the station here, yes, we're right on Wall
Street and that's sure a mixed blessing, I guess.
We get to see exactly what's going on, but we also have to live through it.
It's like going through a military camp right now.
There's those suicide bomber blocking pieces of concrete everywhere.
There's cops and soldiers with, you know, machine guns and all kinds of hostile expressions.
And you know, it really affects you.
Even if they don't talk to you, if they don't approach you, just seeing them around there,
it's really frightening, scary, and makes you realize how much things have changed in
the past couple of weeks, past couple of years, certainly.
So that's where things stand.
Now Bernie S. is in Philadelphia.
Bernie, you've noticed some things down there as well, haven't you?
I have, although it's quite not the state of the art that New York did, but from my
office window, I have a good view of the federal building at 6th and Market Street.
And I casually look up at the roof of that building occasionally because there's an interesting
array of antennas, and occasionally they put a new one up there, so I take note of that
and speculate as to its purpose.
Tonight, today I noticed several machine gun armed, apparently Homeland Security officials
walking around on the rooftop.
So that was an unusual sight, I've never seen that before.
It's clearly because of the near state of siege that we're, our government is afraid
that we're under.
Did they have any kind of uniform, fatigues, anything like that?
They were too far away.
All I could see from the contrast with the sun was their black profiles against the skyline.
Bernie, I've got to ask you if you can move to a more quiet location because there's a
bunch of loud people around you and it's causing the phone to...
I am very sorry.
I'll try to put a scaffold behind me here.
Here we go.
Thank you.
They were saying there's a, all I could make out was their profile against the skyline.
They were clearly carrying automatic weapons and pretty padded, so they're wearing bulletproof
vests, I guess.
Uh-huh.
Well, of course, we welcome any reports from our listeners of other strange things that
might be going on throughout the country.
As many of you know, there was a 48 hour time limit given by George W. Bush to, for Saddam
to get out of his own country.
I don't know where he's supposed to go and I also don't understand if this guy is like
such a horrible war criminal why you'd say, okay, everything will be fine if you just
go somewhere else.
But that means that, I'm looking at live pictures now, well, actually, I guess they're not live
in Kuwait, but nothing seems to be happening as of yet.
But it's insane that people actually are timing this to the moment that he said this in his
speech.
He talked on Monday night at about 8 o'clock and it was 8.10 p.m. when he said the words.
He had 48 hours for Saddam Hussein.
Of course, that means that at around 8.10 or many people are now saying 8 o'clock, that's
when the deadline runs out and if Saddam Hussein is still in Iraq, that's when, hey, he should
go to Kuwait.
What if he did that?
Yeah.
That would really surprise everybody.
No.
You have to maintain a sense of humor in these things.
Sorry, Mike.
There you are.
Yeah.
I think that North Korea has said he's welcome there.
Wow.
That would be some coalition, wouldn't it?
Now, you know, you have to think of that situation too.
North Korea has already expressed its, how shall I say, edginess about what we're doing.
Now we start bombing over in Iraq and we talk about North Korea as the axis of evil, part
of the axis of evil.
What do you think is going to be going through their heads?
What do you think, you know, they just might be a little bit really trigger happy?
We're putting the world in a very, and by we, I mean this government that allegedly
represents us in a very dangerous position when diplomacy certainly should have been
given more of a chance.
And I, you know, I got to say something right now.
I want to go on the record of saying this, all right.
It's basically admitting that I was wrong about a very fundamental thing.
I don't think that Al Gore would have messed it up this badly.
I think there was a difference.
There was a difference between Gore and Bush.
And I think Bush is proving that marvelously right now.
That doesn't mean I still wouldn't have voted for Nader or, you know, somebody that I think
would have done a better job.
But to say that they were identical, no, I think this is something that you only see
a person like this come along once every couple hundred years.
That's going to plunge the world into chaos like this.
Okay.
There we are.
That's an excerpt from March of 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war.
And of course we know what a big hit that was.
I got to say, you know, I take a lot of crap from people who say that we delve into the
politics too much sometimes.
But honestly, I want to ask the people here, do you think that's something that we could
have not paid attention to back then?
Is that something we could have skipped over?
Let me just give out the phone number for people who want to pledge for that as part
of the package.
212-209-2950.
Voltaire, how about you?
What you said about this type of person coming along once every hundred years or so, you
turned out to be wrong again because just five years later we found out about Sarah
Palin.
Oh, she's completely a different character.
But yeah, I don't even want to get into that.
But no, George W. Bush is unique, fortunately.
Redhack.
Well, I think, I mean, in terms of the politics, first of all, the wonderful thing about WBAI
is that people can have opinions on it.
And it's not like this show necessarily has to be unbiased.
We have our own opinions.
And because WBAI is public radio, we're free to air them.
At the same time, that was a major event at the time.
That was something that-
You can't ignore it.
You can't ignore something that's going on right downstairs.
There were soldiers walking around with machine guns and concrete barriers and things like
that.
The world was changing in front of us.
We had to comment on it.
And we have our own unique perspective.
We can talk about the technology, how that is changing when the world is being pulled
over people's eyes.
So, yeah, you know, it's not just about phones and computers.
It's about society.
And we do that in a lot of cases.
We do talk about the technology that affects us and the surveillance and things like that
that are important to the hacker world, even though they're also political at times.
So what we're offering tonight is a full package of every show from 1988 to the end of 2009.
It includes the Iraq War shows, there are many shows about that, as well as all the
other wars that happened and various other bits of history, 9-11, various tribulations
in the hacker world.
It's all yours for a pledge of $75.
Now that's, I think, a good 20 DVDs that you'll get filled with audio files, all of which
are FM quality.
You just got to call 212-209-2950, pledge $75.
You'll also get an off-the-hook t-shirt in the size of your choice.
That's for a pledge of $75, 212-209-2950.
Rob?
I think a really striking thing about that recording you just played is that was seven
years ago.
We've been walking past those same soldiers with those same guns for seven years now,
and how many of us really notice them anymore?
I know.
You get used to it.
You get used to it.
It's a valuable reminder that this was shocking at one point in our history.
And I think that's important, both with development of technology and changes in society, that
we start talking about things and we're shocked by them.
For instance, when caller ID was first implemented, we were talking about that on the air like,
this is never going to succeed.
This is something that people are going to object to having their phone number broadcast.
And now everybody just does it, and people have changed their attitudes completely.
There are so many examples of that with technology over the years that you'll see evolve with
the off-the-hook archive.
It's really something to see how it's all changed, and it continues to change.
Back in 1988 when we first started the show, the phones were completely different.
Relatively few people had computers.
There was no internet to speak of.
And wow, it's all changed so dramatically.
And of course, society has changed dramatically as well.
Now you can see all that.
You can experience all of it.
Many people who get this archive, they basically start at show number one and just listen to
a show a night or maybe a couple of shows a night.
There are some people, certain comic book artists, who listen to all of it at once and
get inspired to do other things.
So yeah, it's incredible.
What you can do with this.
Bernie, I think you have more specific details on just what specifically I'm talking about.
Oh, if you're talking about Ed Piskar.
I am talking about Ed Piskar.
Our graphic novelist friend in Pittsburgh, whose graphic novel series Wysiwyg is spelled
phonetically, is really an amazing homage to what he heard over listening to the archives
of Off the Hook for several years of archives.
And he just was full of immersion for him.
He told me recently that he just listened to it all day for months.
And that's incredible.
And he was so inspired by the perspective he gained from listening to Off the Hook that
he wrote a series of graphic novels, which are really impressive stuff.
He's working on the fourth volume right now.
But I couldn't help listening to, hearing what you were just playing and realizing the
perspective that it gave me.
And as Rob pointed out, if we now saw the same sort of thing going around here in Philadelphia,
if I saw people on the roof with machine guns again, I would not have the same reaction
that I did before.
And we're kind of inured to changes around us.
And I think that's kind of bad.
I think we need to keep perspective of, this is really good.
So I think listening back to the archives is a wonderful opportunity to gain that perspective.
And I encourage our listeners to call 212-209-2950 and pledge support for this radio station.
No other radio station is going to air this stuff, believe me.
And right now we have zero calls on the line.
So Bernie, you might want to push a little harder.
Oh, there's one.
OK, good job.
Let's get some more in there, because it's really, as you say, important to maintain
this perspective, to witness history and learn from that.
And going back beyond 2003, beyond the Iraq War and the changes that have happened since
then, I mean, a lot has changed in 22 years.
A lot has changed.
Back in 1990, 1995, if you were trying to find something about somebody, you couldn't
just go to a search engine and type in their name and then find all of the things that
they'd been up to and all of the things that they were saying.
A lot has changed in that time.
And we've given up a lot.
And a lot of things have become more open and transparent as a result.
And you'll hear that.
You'll hear that development over time, because I'm sure this show has spoken about that.
Those of you who know nothing but, you know, I'm using the phrase loosely, obviously, you
know more than iPhones and Google and things like that.
But if you've grown up in that generation, and that is basically what you're living in,
and you don't have a sense as to what came before that, there is no better way to experience
what came before that, to see it all develop through the eyes of people in the hacker world.
We have so many guests who come on the show, so many listeners who call in, and so many
little bits of news and trivia, and not just in the hacker world, but throughout society,
that we focused upon over the years.
And you will never get a better opportunity to hear all of this.
Yes, it's available online in condensed form, meaning that it doesn't sound very good.
This is what we're offering tonight is basically, it sounds as good as when it went out over
the FM broadcast waves.
So that's something that you cannot get for a pledge of $75 normally, but for this hour,
yes, you can, $75, 212-209-2950, you'll get every single program from 1988 to the end
of 2009.
Mike, how many is that?
Too many to count.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's a huge amount.
And everybody who pledges 35 and above gets the brand new off-the-hook T-shirt designed
by our own Rob T. Firefly.
Okay, we have one more in case people are holding out for the other thing we're offering
tonight.
If you pledge $125, you ready?
$125, you'll get, in addition to the off-the-hook archive, you'll get a special archive of The
Last Hope, basically 20 DVDs, 20 different talks from The Last Hope.
And we're going to do an excerpt of that conference, which took place in 2008, in just a moment.
But that's what we're offering tonight, pledges of $35, $75, $125.
We need to see that phone light up, though.
We have no calls on the line right now, 212-209-2950.
We did great last week.
We did awful the week before that.
Let's make this at least a decent week, 212-209-2950.
In addition to offering you some real quality stuff here, we're giving you the radio station,
an alternative voice, a place where people can speak about these things freely and openly.
We want to be here in years to come, 212-209-2950.
And as we've said many times before, it's not just an internet radio station.
It's not an internet radio program or a podcast.
There's actually a transmitter on the top of the Empire State Building that broadcasts
this station and all of its viewpoints beyond our own.
And by calling and pledging, not only do you get these premiums, which are great in their
own right, but you get the radio station and all that that offers to New York and to the
world.
I see a phone ringing.
I see two phones ringing.
I don't see it being...
I think they're looking for the phone.
It's really funny watching this red light.
I guess it bounced over.
Okay.
They found it.
So that's one call on the line.
We need to have about five calls before we go to the next segment.
And this is a great segment.
This is something from The Last Hope I want to play, I want to share with people, just
as an indication of how rich the hacker world is, how important what we do on the air, how
important we do at conferences and with publications.
Two calls on the line, 212-209-2950.
It's something that must be valued or it will disappear.
And this goes for anything that is a valuable part of today's society.
Dot Red.
Something I want to remind the listeners about is, this archive, it's not just a whole bunch
of isolated talks of whatever might have been important in that particular event.
For instance, with the last archive that was played, we talk about it as if, yeah, this
was really big at that time and defending people who were saying that we shouldn't have
talked about it.
But what happened then is still affecting us right now.
And for me, that kind of reminded me of how this even happened.
I almost forgot.
I walk past these soldiers every day now, these people with these automatic guns.
I remember that feeling of, should I look these people in the eye?
And eventually following this pattern of not looking them in the eye, walking, you know.
And you get used to it.
This kind of thing reminds, first of all, reminds me what it was like when this thing
was coming about.
And for people who maybe don't know about it, it tells them the story of how we got
to where we are now.
Right.
You listen to those first shows after 9-11.
You hear how things are changing slowly and then how things change permanently.
212-209-2950.
We have three calls on the line right now.
And again, for a pledge of $75, you get all the shows, all the off-the-hook shows in full
broadcast quality.
For $125, you get all of that and a 20-disc compilation from The Last Hope of some of
the highlights of that conference.
And we're going to play one of those highlights.
As soon as we get two more calls.
212-209-2950.
Dot Red, you had more?
Yeah.
Actually, you just mentioned 9-11.
I was thinking to myself, you know, for people who are listening to the radio show live but
maybe aren't in New York City, you know, this is, that's exactly a good way to understand.
Happened down the block.
Yeah.
We were here experiencing that sort of thing.
We were here on 9-11.
In fact, we would have been on the air on September 11th.
It was, I think, was that a Tuesday?
We were on the air on Tuesdays at that time.
And, well, the station was off the air when we got, we made it downtown.
But the station was not on the air and we weren't able to actually broadcast.
Otherwise, we would have.
I risked my life coming downtown.
Mike, you did too as well.
That's quite a day.
But the next week, we were on and you could just hear the shock in our voices as to everything
that happened and the things that we noticed.
And the things that we noticed are different than what most people are talking about.
We're talking about what was unusual about the subway system and the phone system, how
the phone network struggled to keep up with things, basically the things that either mass
media ignores completely or gets wrong.
And yeah.
That's exactly it.
That's the point of view you otherwise wouldn't get.
And the only reason we're even allowed to broadcast this point of view is because this
is a listener-supported station.
Well, because you allow us to do it, not you, dot-red.
You're the listeners.
Yeah.
Yeah, the listeners.
But you're one of the listeners.
You guys allow us.
Yeah.
And by pledging, you're saying this is what you want.
You want to hear more of this kind of thing.
By not pledging, well, you know, maybe it's going to be country 99.5 at some point.
We don't want to go down that road again.
212-209-2950.
Still waiting for those two other calls.
We need those to come in.
And then we can get to the amazing excerpt from The Last Hope.
Again, pledge of $75 gets you all the off-the-hook archive shows, about 20 DVDs filled with MP3s
in full broadcast quality.
Each DVD has maybe about 50 shows, something along those lines.
And that's a lot.
That's a whole year's worth.
Yeah, a whole year's worth.
And we're talking over 20 years' worth of shows.
So that's a lot of radio.
And you just stick this on your iPhone or your iPad or your whatever and go jogging
or something or drive cross-country.
You can go back and forth cross-country a few times and be listening to our show the
whole time.
Boy, you'd be sick of us.
But people do this.
People do this all around the world.
When we were traveling around the former Yugoslavia the last few weeks, it's amazing how many
people are out there that listen.
And this is a great way to catch up if you want to find out things that have been going
on and hear the perspective.
As you say, it's more than just a podcast.
It's a radio station.
It's a radio show.
It's something that people riding around in taxi cabs are listening to right now.
It's real.
This is what the magic of radio is all about.
Rob?
Yeah, and what a station.
I mean, WBAI has been on the air for, what, 50 years.
And that's just been not selling a single ad, not selling a single piece of airtime.
Just you out there, the listeners.
You're all that's been keeping the station on the air.
And it's by calling 212-209-2950 and giving us what assistance you can that keeps us here,
that keeps these airwaves populated by alternative viewpoints that would not find airtime in
any other way.
Okay.
Yeah, and I'm told that somebody is actually interested in the thing we were offering a
couple of weeks ago.
I wasn't going to offer it this week, but if someone's interested, I guess we'll still
offer it.
$500 pledge.
You can be a co-host, somebody who actually drives the conversation here on the radio
show for a half hour from like 715 to 745.
And yes, it's a great way to break into radio and to be a part of history.
You'll be able to come in or be on the phone and simply interview us or talk about a particular
subject or whatnot.
Just drive the program in a particular direction.
That half hour is yours.
It's an amazing thing, you know, what radio is all about, especially in the middle of
New York City, especially in the middle of the FM dial.
Okay, so we're waiting for one more call, 212-209-2950.
Then we'll go to the last Hope excerpt.
Again, pledges of $75 gets you all the off-the-hook DVDs from 1988 to 2009.
Pledge of $125 gets you all of that plus 20 DVDs from the last Hope conference, one
of which we're about to excerpt.
And everybody pledging $35 and above gets an off-the-hook t-shirt.
212-209-2950.
Rob?
I've got to say, I'm very much looking forward to whoever has that amount of aid to give
us that they're willing to pledge $500 just to join us for a night.
Yeah, well, you know, people are into this kind of thing.
I was just going to say, I did a quick calculation, and I took out maybe 50 or so episodes from
the years, but it's over a month, it's 40 some odd days worth of radio that you would
be getting that you could listen to and hear.
Obviously, you don't have to sit and listen to all of it, but, you know, I'm sure it's
all dated, right?
So that you could, you know, look and see what kind of time periods you're interested
in and specific dates even.
DRM-free.
You can copy it to however many devices you want, and that's what it's for.
Spread it around.
212-209-2950.
Okay, we have that one call.
Let's come in.
Bernie, is there anything you want to add before we go to the excerpt?
Well, I just was really kind of inspired by what Rob said, that WBAI is really a beacon
of alternative voices and alternative thinking, not just off-the-hook, but 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, the whole thing.
All the time, this station is broadcasting alternative viewpoints that you're not going
to hear on other radio stations, and that is a precious thing in these days of media
consolidation where your news and information becomes more and more homogenized.
This is really a refreshing source of information and opinion, and I really encourage our listeners
to support this project, which has been successful for 50 years, and it's struggling to keep
going.
Again, call 212-209-2950.
We've got some great premiums.
Anybody pledging $35 or more gets an amazing off-the-hook t-shirt freshly designed by Rob
T. Firefly.
For a pledge of $75, you get the incomplete off-the-hook archives going all the way back
to 1988.
As Dot Wright just mentioned, it's thousands of hours of stimulating listening, and for
a pledge of $125 or above, you get the archives, the t-shirt, and 20 DVDs, video DVDs from
The Last Hope, The Highlight.
This is a really amazing package of information, but first and foremost, it's supporting a
great radio station, so call 212-209-2950.
And this excerpt we're about to hear is something called Hacking Democracy, an In-Depth Analysis
of the ES&S Voting Systems.
We'll be hearing Sandy Clark talking about Project Everest, which was a comprehensive
security review of the electronic voting technology used in the state of Ohio.
It's really enlightening, it's really fascinating, and it's the kind of thing that we talk about
here on this show.
It's the kind of thing that we talk about at the conferences.
And it's yours, along with 19 other DVDs and 20 audio DVDs from off-the-hook for a pledge
of $125.
212-209-2950.
Let's listen.
So here's a picture, by the way, of the big batch scanner running our Everest firmware.
So what about the paper ballots?
I mean, that's pretty much all that's left us.
Well, there are problems with that, too.
You see, because of those cheap, crappy wafer locks, it's trivially simple to get access
to the glass surface of the scanner.
So all you have to do is open the scanner up and put a post-it down where you don't
want the votes to be counted.
Paint something reflective, nail polish or something on it.
And then, of course, it's trivially simple to forge the paper ballots as well.
The paper ballots rely for their security on something called non-read ink.
And you'll find this ink on security certificates like stock certificates.
You'll see it on deeds.
You'll see it on checks or cashier's checks sometimes.
Usually it's wavy lines or an abstract pattern in a yellow ink or a red ink.
And it relies for its security on the fact that that ink is invisible to the scanner.
So on this ballot, some of these boxes are printed in regular ink, and some of those
boxes are printed in security ink.
The one at the top is in the security ink.
And when you put that ballot through the scanner, either the big batch one or the individual
precinct one, the scanner can't see marks where the security ink are, and it just passes
that ballot right through.
But if you try and make a photocopy of the ballot or you try and print out your own version
of it, that prints out in regular ink.
The scanner sees boxes where it shouldn't see boxes, and it spits it out and it prints
across that LCD screen, possibly counterfeit.
So how do you forge a ballot that's got this high security ink?
With whiteout.
All you have to do is get rid of the little security boxes, make as many copies as you
want, and the scanner can't tell the difference.
This ballot was accepted as authentic by both of our scanners.
Now you might think that an alert election observer might notice that those boxes are
missing.
They might not.
Remember, Matt talked about the fact that every single precinct selection is different,
and every single ballot looks different because my dog catcher isn't the same as yours.
And my school board proposal isn't the same as somebody else's.
But they might not notice.
I mean, they've been up since 5.30 in the morning.
But if you want to be picky, and we like to be picky, you've got to put that security
ink back.
Well, you can't buy it.
There are a couple of places where you can get a hold of the yellow ink or the red ink
in small quantities, but the black ink is really, really hard to come by.
So once again, in our world, if you can't buy it, how do you get it?
You make it yourself.
We made ours with the absolutely cheapest color inkjet cartridge we could find at the
local CVS.
You see, another name for this security ink is composite ink.
This is an ugly splotch, I know.
I got a C plus in art.
The point is it's a proof of concept.
That is invisible to the scanner.
And that ballot was accepted as authentic by both of the scanners.
And you know what this ink is?
This is the stuff your home inkjet printer makes when you run out of black.
It just takes the color inkjet cartridge, it mixes all the colors up together, and all
I did was stick a paintbrush in all the holes and smear it around.
And that is security ink.
So what did we learn from all of this?
The first thing that we learned is that the certification procedures in place to guarantee
that vendors, voting machines, and their whole systems are secure just don't work.
You know what these procedures are?
Are the comments in the same format?
Do the variables follow a naming convention?
Is there only one return statement per function?
I don't see how that enhances the security at all.
The second thing that we learned is that the security of a system that is intended
or needs to be secure can't be added on as an afterthought.
You can't just add a couple of locks and a seal and throw a password in and claim that
the system's secure.
If you need it to be secure, then you've got to design security in from its inception.
Oh, by the way, the touchscreen voting machines have hard-coded passwords.
We found a comment next to a hard-coded password that said, I kid you not, this comment said,
we hard-coded this so that hackers couldn't use it.
Yeah, you can't make this stuff up.
The third thing that we learned is that we weren't the only ones looking at this system.
Along with the academic teams, Ohio hired a group of commercial software testers.
They have a methodology and they've got a business that goes around trying to determine
the security of software systems.
They didn't find anything that we didn't find, but we found a lot that they didn't.
So why did our ad hoc, thrown-together method find so much more than they did?
We think it's because we approached it like hackers.
We sat down, every one of us with our little piece, and we basically said, how do I attack
the system?
If I poke at it here, which way does it move?
And what does that tell me?
And it allowed us to go off on tangents if it looked interesting.
And that allowed us to make some of our best finds.
For example, the PalmPet emulator.
The first thing we noticed when we unboxed that touchscreen is that there's no on-off
switch.
But if you stick that little box in that little slot, the machine comes on.
Wow.
Okay, there's a switch in there somewhere.
If you put the wrong one in, it comes on, but it gives you an error message, wrong peb.
So that means there's some communication going on.
And so the next step was just to try and decode that communication.
Another example is finding the ballots.
The reason we found we could forge ballots was because we tried to make a photocopy.
And we sent it through, and it spit it out and said, possibly counterfeit.
So we thought, okay, the papers aren't the same color.
The weight, this is paper and this is cardstock.
But looking closely at the ballot, you could see that some boxes didn't look exactly the
same as the others.
It was a little fuzzier, not quite as clear.
Okay, what does that mean?
And that tangent led us to that.
And then the one other thing that we did is that we stepped back and looked at this not
as this problem with this machine and this problem with that one, but as pieces of an
entire system.
And we were able to find our major discovery, that of viral propagation.
Because we said, we've got a vulnerability here, that we've got this piece of a puzzle.
How do we use that to attack this piece?
And so the fourth discovery, and this is the most important, is that we were able to
actually demonstrate an attack that a single person, a single voter could do at a single
machine that would virally propagate all the way back to the election central headquarters
of the county.
And what this means is that not only could an attacker change the votes on one machine,
not only could a malicious poll worker alter the results for a precinct, but one person
in one podunk little precinct, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, can upload malicious
code onto a machine, which will then write itself onto the removable media, which at
the end of the election gets taken out of that voting machine and sent back to the headquarters
where it gets put into that Windows box running the election management software, where it
takes advantage of a number of vulnerabilities and writes itself onto that, and thereby alters
the results for the election of the entire county.
And if you don't think that's important, please remember that in 2004, the entire country
waited to find the results of who got Ohio's electoral votes.
And who got Ohio's electoral votes depended on the results of Cuyahoga County.
One single county made all the difference in who became president.
So, you know, it's true what they say.
One voter really can make a difference.
Okay, that's an excerpt from the last Hope Hacking Democracy in-depth analysis of the
E, S, and S voting systems you're hearing from Sandy Clark there.
And that's just a small bit of that one talk.
You'll get 20 talks with all kinds of similarly provocative topics, along with the full off-the-hook
archive for a pledge of $125, but you got to call now because this is only being offered
for the next 13 minutes, 212-209-2950.
That kind of thing, you know, presented by educated people who know what they're talking
about is enough to really open up your eyes about what's going on around us.
And it's the kind of thing that you don't hear in the mass media, which is why it's
essential that people share this information.
You saw many references to things on the screen.
Obviously, we can't show you what's on the screen here on the radio, but you can certainly
see what's on the screen if you get the DVDs.
212-209-2950, join the one caller on the line now.
We need about five or six calls to make tonight a success in the eyes of the BAI overlords.
212-209-2950, please join the people on the line right now because we need to do this
in order to keep the station going.
Mike?
You know, it struck me as I was listening to that excerpt that that hour-long talk for
a pledge, you know, of $125, that'd almost be worth it just to get that one talk.
Oh, it would be more than worth it, yes.
But not only do you get that one talk, you get 19 other Hope Talks, you get Jello Biafra,
you get our keynotes, who are our keynotes?
We also get Steve Ramban.
You get all—
And Jello, as you said.
And all kinds of—
All kinds.
There's so many.
I said so many, but they're—yeah, they're all out there.
And then you get 20 years' worth of off-the-hook.
More than 20 years.
And then you get the t-shirt, and then you enable us to keep creating this content.
Yeah, you know, I would go a step further and say that if it was just a call out to
people to pledge $125 to keep a marvelous place like WBAI alive on the FM dial broadcasting
off the top of the Empire State Building to four different states and throughout the world
on the internet, that would be more than worth it just to pledge $125, Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, what have you.
But we're throwing in all this extra stuff as our way of saying thank you, our personal
way of donating to the station and to say thank you to the people that are calling in
now.
212-209-2950.
We do need to see more people calling in.
But, you know, that talk, that talk really blew me away with just its insightfulness
and the way that you don't have to be a technical guru to understand this.
And this is what we try to do with Off the Hook and with the Hope Conference is reach
out to people who aren't techies because they need to understand what the techies are
saying and the significance to their lives.
And that's why we step out of the world of computers and phones occasionally to talk
about the real world as well because it all has bearing.
Go ahead, Ray.
You know, and it's interesting because we were talking about with the Off the Hook archive
and even with these, you know, you can kind of see how things have changed but also at
the same time you can see how things have stayed the same in terms of voting machines.
They haven't gotten any better.
You know, it's still security through obscurity and it's still, you know, counting first and
security second.
And so, you know, that's what struck me about that is really there hasn't been any improvement
in that realm as far as I can tell.
We're still asking questions and conducting as many experiments as possible.
But you know, none of this is possible without support from the public.
If people don't want to hear this, then we get that message and the research stops.
But people have to support inquisitiveness and rebelliousness and spreading of information.
Otherwise, there's no way it can continue.
David.
Yeah, I think that that talk in particular just highlights how important hacker conference
are not just for entertainment but also just to understand, you know, like all the important
things that are going on in this world.
And if you can't physically go to one, you know, getting the DVDs of Hope for instance
is a very good way to find out what kind of information was being conveyed during that.
And in this particular case, not only able to get that, you're able to keep the whole
radio station alive.
That's right.
Now, most people can't make it to the conferences.
We talk to people all around the world.
A lot of people have trouble getting into this country because of visa requirements
and things like that.
People have financial issues getting across the country even.
This is the best way to experience that, experience the radio show, help the radio station out.
And you can do it on your own terms because you can put it on a credit card if you want
to.
But again, we're only offering this until the top of the hour.
After that, you can still pledge to the station, but you won't get these premiums.
That's the thing.
We can only offer these while we're on the air because we'd go broke otherwise, because
this is below cost for us to be giving these away for this kind of price, 212-209-2950.
We still only have one call on the line.
Bernie, please make it five calls.
Do your magic.
Bernie?
He's given up.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
I'm here.
I'm here.
I'm sorry.
I had my cough button on.
I had been coughing.
Okay.
Just moments ago, we just got an email from Travis in Maine who just emailed us saying,
hey, I want the premiums from last week if I can pledge for that right now.
It doesn't work that way.
We have great premiums every time we do a fundraising show.
Next week, I guarantee you, there are people who are going to contact us.
It happens every week.
I want to get the premiums that you had last week.
This is a really great package of thank you gifts.
You're getting the radio station, which is really what this is all about.
Maybe we should explain why we have to have this policy.
It's not that we're being jerks about it.
It's that if we offered all these amazing premiums for the entire duration of the pledge
drive, which is something like five weeks long, we would be bankrupt by the end of it
because all these people would be grabbing it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
We'd have to come up with all of this.
We can only afford to do this for one hour per week.
It's literally come down to that.
If you want this week's premiums, you got to call now, 212-209-2950.
They won't be offered next week.
We'd be bankrupt in just a matter of days.
This is a really special moment right now.
We've got about five minutes left in the show to call, 212-209-2950.
Get this amazing package of premiums.
It's great material.
It'll last you a year or more.
Call 212-209-2950.
You'll get a great off-the-hook t-shirt designed by Rocky Firefly for a pledge of $35 or more.
You get the complete off-the-hook archives going all the way back to 1988.
Every show, it's like 1,400 hours or something.
So it's only $75, and for $125 or more, you get all of the above, plus 20 DVDs we just
talked about.
Sandy Clark did this great talk at The Last Hope about voting machine vulnerabilities,
and there's 19 more really great videos in that package.
Please call 212.
Actually, Bernie, you really are magic because there's five calls on the line now.
Thank you very much for bringing those calls in, and thank those people for calling in.
But you mentioned Sandy Clark on that panel.
There are actually seven people on that panel, so it was quite a provocative talk, and a
lot of interesting things were revealed, a lot of things that I'm sure certain people
wouldn't want revealed, and that's only one talk.
We have 20 such talks to give to you for a pledge of $125 from The Last Hope, and in
addition to that, you get the entire off-the-hook archive.
Now it's possible.
It's possible that you already have the off-the-hook archive that you pledged in the past and got
that.
It's a tremendous gift.
It really is.
Many eyes have been opened by the radio show, and I'm not exaggerating.
People have talked to me and said that this show has changed their lives, has made them
question things and inspired them that, hey, there's people like me out there that are
into this kind of thing and want to experiment and spread information.
So yeah, if you already have it, it's a great thing to give to somebody that you think has
potential.
Join the seven calls on the line right now and help the radio station out, help off-the-hook
out.
Not Kevin, you have something to say.
I do, and I have to say that these premiums that we're offering, the DVDs, the shows,
the radio station, your support, everything.
When you say that this show, this radio station actually opens people's eyes, it really does
because it opened my eyes when I was a young little kid listening to the show back in 1998.
They were firmly shut.
I was a blind child, and then this show came along and it opened them and opened me to
so many things that I had never understood before.
And then it's especially important for people in my generation to have something like this,
this archive, these textbooks into technology that we were born into.
We were born into the age of the internet, the search engine, the iPad, all the things
before that that I never got to experience.
This is my only way to understand, to learn about them, and that's what is so important
that you donate to this station because there's nothing else in the world like this.
And what about the future generations?
What about the children?
What about those people who have not yet turned on the radio?
We need to be there for them as well, and we need to have more people come in and speak
with them, but that's only possible if there is a radio station for them to listen to in
the first place.
212-209-2950.
In the last couple of minutes of our show, we have eight calls on the line.
Please keep those calls coming in.
Again, 125 gets you everything, 75 gets you some of it, 35 gets you the shirt.
I could go into more detail, but we're so short on time.
Redhack.
You know, it's also a great time capsule, too, this show, to listen to.
A lot of us have done a lot of traveling.
We've gone to different conferences.
We've participated in all sorts of things around the world, and you can hear that, and
you can hear that experience through our viewpoint.
And things like that might excite you.
You might want to go to these things, come to Hope, go to conferences in Europe and things
like that.
It certainly did that for me.
Without this show and without this community, I would have no idea about any of these things.
And I found out about a lot of them through this show, and so to hear that history, it's
a great deal.
Okay, we're pretty much out of time.
Voltaire, last words.
I was going to say, if you're listening to this show, you probably like the medium of
audio and hearing news through audio.
There's no audio archives of a PC magazine or Wired magazine or even 2600 magazine.
This is one of the few sources that goes back 20 years.
This only started in 2004, so this goes back over 20 years of history.
It's history.
It really is history.
And so is the Hope Conference.
And you can get it all for pledge of 125, 212, 209, 2950.
I want to thank everybody for calling in, and we're out of here.
PC show is up next, and we'll be back again next week with all kinds of other things.
And here's our computer song for the night, a tribute to Ronnie James Dio.
Good night.
Waitin' for the light to come on, waitin' for the light to come on, waitin' for the