Like many of you, like many Americans, I have felt frustrated and betrayed by the state
of the mainstream media in this country, a media whose priorities seem out of step with
their responsibilities.
We need a media that strengthens democracy, not a media that strengthens the government.
We need a media that enriches public discourse, not one that enriches corporations.
Hi, I'm Jane Fonda, and this is WBAI, listener-supported, non-commercial radio in New York.
And you're listening to 99.5 FM, WBAI New York, the time is 7pm, time for Off The Hook.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cuff.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bondedly bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bondedly bond!
And good evening, the program is Off The Hook, Red Hacked here in the studio, filling
in on an emergency basis.
Joined by Mike.
Hi.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Go ahead and announce yourself, sorry.
Mike Aiello from Differwear.
Voltaire.
Hello.
Bicycle Mark.
Hello.
And on the phone, I believe we have Bernie S.
Yes, greetings from somewhere in Pennsylvania.
You're not on a cell phone, are you?
You can probably tell.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious.
And do we have a manual?
I don't know, do we have a manual?
We have you, but we have a terrible echo, so maybe if you can figure out what's causing
that.
What kind of echo do you have?
I can sort of hear it myself.
Yeah, it's worse for us, I think, if you can only sort of hear it.
Hmm.
Well, we also have Kyle here sitting next to me on another cell phone.
Let's see if he has an echo too.
Hello?
No, that sounds great.
Oh.
Except I hear a second after he says hello, which is kind of funny.
Well, that I can't help, but your echo, really, we need to help.
Turn down your radio.
Please.
Okay, you want to call me again, or should I call you?
How should we do this?
I think the both of you should be on one cell phone.
Yes, that would be the solution.
Well, then why don't we have the cell phone that's not echoing be the cell phone that
we use?
Yes.
All right.
All right, so see if they can figure out which cell phone that is.
What was happening for non-technical listeners was that Emanuel's voice was being picked
up by two cell phones at once, and there was a propagation delay from one carrier to the
other.
So, anyway.
I've thrown that phone out the window, and now I'm speaking on Kyle's phone.
How do I sound now?
You sound a lot better.
Which phone was it that didn't work so we could diss the carrier?
I'm sorry, I hear voices in the distance.
Am I not hearing everybody?
Which carrier did not work that you just threw out?
I can't hear whoever that is at all.
That was Voltaire's microphone is not turned on, apparently.
What was happening?
The microphone's not turned on.
I can't hear it no matter who he is.
The microphone is most certainly turned on, but maybe it's not working.
Would you like to repeat my question?
This has not been a good day for us.
Basically, can I give a summation of what I've been through in the last couple of weeks?
Sure.
If we don't like it, we can hang up on you.
Yeah, that would be just fine.
I'm here with Kyle, and he's been a big part of this whole charade from the beginning,
where we basically brought the smart car up to Canada to get it fixed
because it was having all kinds of electronic issues,
things that we weren't allowed to look at
because the car is basically one big DMCA machine
that doesn't allow you to access certain bits of it
unless you're a certified mechanic with Mercedes who makes the smart car.
Basically, since this car came from Canada, it's five years old,
and the warranty had just expired.
Of course, something major had to happen,
and we had to drive it in kind of slow mode up to Canada to get it fixed.
It turned out to be a big deal.
The computer had to be replaced,
and it was really a farce because for two days they couldn't figure out
how to get the code for the new keys that they made for this car.
Basically, Kyle can probably explain it a lot better than I can,
but when you get a new computer, you have to re-key or re-code your keys,
and in order to do that, they need to get code from another office of theirs,
and apparently they can only get 10 codes at a time via fax,
and we literally had to wait around for two days
while they kept trying code after code to see which one would work.
It sounds absurd.
It sounds like these people don't know what they're doing,
and I think both of those facts are true.
I'm going to hand it over to Kyle
if he can maybe answer any specific questions as to just what it was we went through with this car.
Basically, to cut to today's part of the story, the car broke down again.
After we brought it back, after spending over $3,000 in repairs,
it just broke down again.
Some other electronic issue that now we have to try and figure out.
Folks, if you ever have an opportunity to buy a car,
buy an old-fashioned mechanical one that you can actually get your hands around,
not something that you need permission and access to get into the computer in the first place.
Is it even possible to buy a car that doesn't have all sorts of technology in it now
that you don't have control over?
No.
It's getting really, really difficult.
Most modern cars are computer-controlled.
Basically, if you buy a new car, there are more computers nowadays than ever before.
It's been progressing.
A lot of actual chip manufacturers end up testing various equipment in new cars
because there are so many different systems and so much of it is computer-controlled.
In this case, since the car is foreign, you have the added sort of,
I guess I would liken it to region coding, whereas the car is Canadian.
This could happen to any American car, but it adds a step of difficulty
because not only is the computer system proprietary
and they maintain strict control over interfacing with that computer system to do repairs,
whether they be simple or complex, but being that it is Canadian, you now have the inability,
even if you are a qualified mechanic, whether that's from a dealer or an independent shop,
you have this barrier across borders where you cannot, with a Canadian car,
it's been selected and sort of programmed for a foreign market.
Having it in America makes it very difficult because the shops, if they're given access at all,
aren't able to access with the Canadian system.
This is a big problem.
It's happening with cars down here.
I guess it just adds difficulty that it is foreign.
So if you were to move to another country, I don't know, maybe within Europe or something,
or you wanted to take your car, does this kind of problem come up in that kind of situation?
If I move from France to England or something like that, are they going to be able to fix my car
or would I have to take it back to France?
Yeah, absolutely.
If you relocated and you wanted to bring your vehicle with you
and it was a modern computer-controlled vehicle,
and they go back decades at least with the advent of these modern systems,
so there's a lot of cars on the road that have this,
if you wanted to bring your car, even if it was, say, 10, 15 years old, with you,
you would have to find a mechanic that can access these kinds of computer systems
and then have even the ability to access a foreign system, basically.
So absolutely.
It was actually the late 70s when microprocessors started being installed in American automobiles.
Wow, really? That far back?
It was actually the late 70s because I remember the Chrysler K cars were using RCA's so-called COSMAC microprocessor,
the 1802, which was the first computer that I built used an 1802 microprocessor.
It was a CMOS chip, so it ran really high temperature and low current and all that.
Anyway.
Hey, Bernie, have they been using DRM all along since the 70s?
No, no, that came in later.
I mean, there was no digital rights management, but it was still proprietary.
In other words, they weren't telling people outside their dealer network how to do certain things,
but there was no digital rights management per se.
That came quite a few years later.
A lot of the technology was put in for efficiency and emissions and those kinds of controls.
That's why Chrysler started doing it, because that was around the same time that all the emissions rules started coming down.
The EPA started requiring only so many certain smog particles coming out of your exhaust system per minute.
To do all that, there was no way to do that with discrete electronics,
so that's why they had to actually program microprocessors to do these complex tasks.
It was emissions controls that started the whole ball rolling.
It's important to remind our listeners that it's not technology and the cars is not inherently bad.
It's the DRM that they add to it that's bad.
Absolutely.
Yeah, the deployment of it.
Yeah.
I just want to point out, this is Bicycle Mark.
I was recently in Mongolia, and there you have a situation where a lot of cars are coming from the west,
but a lot of cars are coming from the east, and people are always looking for ways to import cars.
The cheaper, the better.
Sometimes you see they have steering wheels on the British side, and sometimes they have steering wheels on the left side.
My point with this little anecdote is that people still, despite the controls and despite the different systems,
they're still doing it.
They're still bringing cars from different countries, and they find ways to fix them,
especially in Mongolia, where everybody seems to be a mechanic.
Do they have Cuban mechanics imported as well?
No, no.
It was all Mongolians.
Well, I just wanted to add to that, to sort of finish the story as well.
We basically had to get a replacement computer in the Smart, and as soon as I heard that,
we were going to go ahead with getting this new computer in.
I said, well, we would like to keep our old parts because E has obviously paid for the original computer,
and if he's going to buy a new one, he should get his old parts.
This is fairly common when you get a repair.
If something's wrong with a part, you would want to keep it.
Maybe you want to look it over, make sure that it's not unnecessarily being replaced and that sort of situation.
I'm actually holding in my hand the Smart SAM unit, and it's a part number 0011868V013,
and it's made by the Siemens VDO Corporation.
Siemens has a vehicle division.
VDO has been making instrumentation for German cars and others for many years now.
I've got it in my hand, and there was not too much wrong with it,
a little indication that something did go wrong, maybe a burnt connection.
Something did fail on it, and we're going to look into it.
I think we're brave enough.
I think what we're going to do is open this, and as far as I know, that would be a violation of DMCA
because am I allowed to open this? E, what do you think?
No, I don't care. Go ahead. Open it. I don't care.
You should put the parts in the anti-DMCA 2600 coffee mug.
I'm afraid a lawyer is going to be calling in right now with a DMCA takedown notice.
You can't talk about it on the air.
Actually, he's sitting in your backseat right now, and he's going to stop you from opening the case.
Yes, well, there were some burnt parts on it, and maybe we'll get to it later.
We are driving, and it is dangerous to do that kind of thing while you're driving.
You need good lighting if you were to do that anyway.
So are you guys going to make it to the show tonight?
Are you driving a rental car or what?
Yeah, we're on our way driving now.
Basically, the thing that happened today is the charging system on the Smart was having problems,
and we had to get it towed because apparently the alternator has now failed.
And that's interesting because we made it down all the way back in the Smart no problem
and drove it around for a couple of days, and it's worked really, really great until today.
But our problems didn't end with the dealership and all the problems with getting keys
and various personalities, different stories.
Dealerships are hard to deal with as is, but these guys seem particularly bent on giving us the runaround.
So we got the car back finally just in time for our scheduled departure home and made the trip back.
We had to go through a different part than we came in, and it's always better to not go the way you came.
So we went through the border at Vermont, and that's where things got a little interesting
because we are driving this foreign car.
Everything was legitimate and clear, but they seemed to want to give us a little extra attention,
and it was in the evening time.
So what ended up happening is basically we were called in and we had to be detained at the border,
and we got what they would have you think is a thorough inspection,
but I don't know, E, do you want to describe a little bit more about how this started?
Yeah, well, I don't know how many times you guys have heard me talk about border incidents coming into this country,
but yeah, Kyle and I had yet another one of those coming back from Canada.
This was with the fine folk at I-91.
If you want to see them yourself, just drive down I-91,
and if you're lucky you'll be asked to come visit them inside their sparse little holding area.
Basically for about an hour and 15 minutes we were forced to sit on a bench next to a draftee window in 40-degree temperature
while they sat on another side of the room with their space heaters,
and they just basically made us feel like criminals,
kept asking us all kinds of questions, asking us how we knew each other,
asking us the meaning of certain words that were written on pieces of paper inside our pockets.
At one point they asked me, what does this code mean?
And I honestly had no idea what the code meant.
It turned out it was a code that was written down at one of the places we stayed for the Wi-Fi network.
And of course you try to explain that to these guys, they had no idea what we were even talking about.
They kept asking the same questions over and over again over the course of the entire time we were there.
And it was very nerve-wracking because we had to make sure that our story,
even though we weren't up to anything, we had to make sure our story stayed consistent
because they would ask the same question and they'd ask a different person,
and the slightest variation would, of course, make you suspicious in a different way.
And they would say certain things to see what your reaction was.
I think most of the questions weren't really to find out the answer to the question,
but mostly to see how you would react to the interrogation.
And throughout the whole thing they had this guy that just was there to watch us.
Well, they were tearing apart the car.
Boy, did they tear it apart.
They basically went through everything and didn't even put things back.
They didn't put things back in our knapsacks or a piece of paper all over the car.
Train tickets from Europe were on the chair and on the floor.
But there was this one guy that was watching us the whole time, and he was supposedly the friendly guy.
He was the guy that basically didn't say harsh things to us, but his job was basically to keep an eye on us.
And we watched what he was doing.
Kyle and I didn't speak to each other throughout the entire incident,
and that's a tactic that is very useful because they're listening to everything you say
and seeing how you interact, and if you don't give them that, they have all the less to work with.
But he was basically taking apart paperclips.
All these paperclips were in some kind of a chain,
and he spent about ten minutes just basically one by one taking them all apart.
And you have to wonder, this is what they pay people to do, is take apart paperclips?
Didn't seem to make any sense.
And then he moved on to Band-Aids, and he had a whole stack of Band-Aids,
and he started sorting the Band-Aids into different piles.
You have to ask yourself, how did the paperclips get into a chain in the first place?
How did the Band-Aids get unsorted?
Obviously, they just keep this guy busy, and his job is to watch over you and make you feel nervous.
There were no less than five people in the facility going back and forth,
showing each other clipboards, going on to computers,
and making you feel really, really nervous.
There was nobody else who came in there.
So obviously all the talking had to have been about us, except we had no idea what it was they were saying.
Emanuel?
Yes, go ahead.
Let's get this straight.
This is when you were trying to come back into the United States, correct?
Of course.
We've been to every single Balkan republic.
I've been to North Korea.
I've been to Cuba.
I've been to Albania.
I've been to all these different countries.
The United States is the only country that has ever treated me this way.
I've been to Iran as well.
I live here, and I just wondered to myself, what is it that they're looking for?
What do they think they're going to find?
I really would love to know, and I never am able to find this out.
The interesting thing about this is you're both American citizens, and what are they going to do?
You're actually not legally required to answer any of their questions.
That's an interesting story.
I know there was a story recently about somebody who didn't answer questions.
There's a guy named Paul Carl Lukacs, L-U-K-A-C-S.
He's a blogger, journalist, and he's got a blog, nomadlaw.com.
He was detained by feds for not answering questions coming back from Beijing through the San Francisco airport earlier this year.
He documented it very well, and what he did is he refused to answer any of their questions,
and it got them really upset at customs, but there was nothing they could do to him.
They basically wasted an hour or two of his time, but he just kept refusing to answer questions.
What are they going to do, deport you?
Where are they going to deport you?
You're an American citizen.
They can't deny you access to your own country.
You're not required to answer questions.
They can go through all your stuff.
They're legally allowed to do, and they apparently did that,
I'm wondering if you would have been detained longer or shorter if you just smiled at them and said,
I don't have to answer your questions.
Yeah, Bernie, I agree.
We really got the sense that they were just looking for anything possible,
and I think between Ian and I, just keeping quiet but answering necessary things to keep their process going, that was it.
Answering that and then keeping quiet just felt like the best thing to do,
but I think between the two of us, we felt like since we are completely legit and that same sentiment,
like we have nothing to hide, there's no reason, there's nothing for us to be concerned about,
and basically let's just see how far could they possibly take it.
There's nothing that they can find, and I think keeping that in the back of our minds was maybe one sliver of calm
that helped keep us calm during that because it was an ordeal.
It was ridiculous.
It was a complete waste, and they really, as he indicated, they were doing things that were really absurd.
There were tons and tons of officers there, I mean five, six officers there,
and they would talk very quietly, very hush-hush, pull the clipboard around,
or some guy would come in, and he would look around at the screen,
and they kind of make you feel like they don't even say anything.
They just sort of nod their head and, hey, look at the screen and act like it's important.
They looked like some teenage girls looking at their news feed on their site or something.
But at any rate, the one really unprofessional thing is eventually after about 70 minutes,
they completed all this stuff, asking us stupid questions, ridiculous stuff.
They said, okay, go ahead, you can have your belongings.
They had our wallets and our contents of our pockets just strewn all over the counter,
and as I was assembling it, I said, you know, if something's missing, I'd like my driver's license back.
And they actually had our passports and our driver's licenses behind the desk,
and they had completely forgotten to give them back to us.
And we were just imagining what that would be like if we had actually been—
Hey, Kyle?
Yeah, go ahead.
Was it an RFID passport that you had?
No, no, mine doesn't expire until much later, a couple years now.
Oh.
No, it's fine.
But I don't know if EASE is new or older. Is your password older, I think?
It's a little older.
Yeah, it's a little older. We're still outside of that realm.
But at any rate, we were wondering, gosh, we get so scared but so spooked by these guys who really are just nothing.
They have no reason to give us this kind of crap.
And it's just a frightful thing to be pulled aside and kept like that.
And you get nervous because you start second-guessing yourself.
Gee, maybe there is.
But realizing that there wasn't anything, we just imagined if we had actually gotten in the car and driven
and then realized we had to go back and get our stuff.
I mean, that would have been insane.
All right.
Well, I think we're going to move on now, though, because—
Yeah, go ahead, Mike.
Yeah, we need to get on to—we have our guest here from DifferAware, Mike.
And you handed me a story, a couple stories, as we were walking in.
One is about schools.
This story you handed me is from Houston.
Schools are making kids wear RFID tags.
First of all, what's an RFID tag? Maybe we should start there.
Sure. So if folks aren't aware, RFID stands for radio frequency identification.
It's a small chip.
Some of them are passive.
Some of them are active.
Active means they have a little battery in them.
The passive ones are activated by the signal that's used to read it.
They basically backscatter a unique identifier.
Some schools, this one in Houston for the story we brought up today, are—
Look at these smiling children, though. They look happy.
They're wrapping RFID tags around them in their identity badge.
And with an active tag, you can actually track within a few feet where someone is.
So a child.
A child.
Sixth grade child.
You know within a few feet where the child is?
Well, where the RFID tag is.
Okay.
And there's an interesting difference there.
The thinking is you can sort of track where they are during the day,
which is convenient if you're running a school.
And they also propose it as a safety mechanism.
So if there's a fire, they can say, oh, well, all the students have left the building.
There's different ways to think about that last bit with the fire.
What if the student takes off the tag and leaves it in their bag and then leaves the building?
You've got firemen chasing a bag somewhere.
Or what if someone has two badges and there's still a student in the building?
Hey, Mike, what was the real motivation, you think,
for the school district requiring all the students to carry around RFID tags so they could be tracked?
Didn't this have something to do with getting money from the state and ensuring attendance?
That kind of thing?
I'm actually not super sure why it all came about.
I think, Bernie, that was a different story you're talking about.
I'm reading this article.
It's an article in the Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, which is a pretty good paper.
And they really don't say.
I've worked with school districts in the past on technology boards,
and they seem to be mainly interested in impressing the parents with, oh, look at our shiny new technology.
So I think that's probably the case here.
No, actually, this was in Houston, Texas.
I'm reading an article from the Houston Chronicle.
Not the Houston Chronicle, the Y-E-S-T-O-N Chronicle.
The what?
It says here that the school district was able to recover $194,000 in state funding since December 2008
by using this system and basically chipping or acquiring 13,500 of the district's 36,000 students to have these RFID badges.
So apparently there was a financial motivation behind this, which is kind of interesting.
I mean, really, this would be way more effective if we just put implants in all of them, though.
At least then you'd be guaranteed that unless they dug it out, it would be with them at all times.
What if they covered the implant with tinfoil?
Oh, well, then.
Okay.
And, Mike, you also handed me a story from Germany, a little bit older.
So Germany now has or has had for quite some time ID cards, sort of like a driver's license without the driving permission part.
And now these ID cards, which every German has to have one or almost every German?
It's required that you have a national identification card.
It's not required to have one of these yet unless you get it after the end of this month.
Okay.
But they expire, right?
They do expire.
So I don't know how.
Eventually, just like us here in the U.S., anybody who's gotten a new passport after 2007 has an RFID-enabled passport.
Any German citizen who gets an ID badge after the end of this month will have an RFID-enabled document.
Is the RFID stuff in the U.S. passports actually being used yet, or is it kind of?
Yes.
So there's the ePass through and a few other programs where you can sort of walk up to the U.S. border if you're coming in,
and you beep your card, present some other identification, and walk through without talking for too long to the agent.
So every German is going to have one of these RFID cards.
And is it like the same as in the Houston schools where they can track every German to within a meter?
No.
These are passive cards.
The Infineon smart chip is what they're using in the cards.
And the Chaos Computer Club.
So I spent some time out in Germany, got a distribution set up there in prep for this new project that the German government is putting through.
And the Chaos Computer Club came in and showed that it's pretty straightforward to duplicate the information on this card,
change the unique numbers required to use this card for financial transactions,
pull the biometric information off the card similar to how they have done with the U.S. passport,
and all sorts of other interesting hacks that pull electronic signatures, fingerprints, and these things off the card and use them for nefarious purposes.
So is the information not encrypted, or is it just not encrypted well?
Well, there was a show at Black Hat, Christopher Tarvesnak, I'm sorry if I pronounced his name wrong,
where these chips on these cards, you could just reverse engineer them and pull it off.
So it's – I'm not exactly sure about the encryption. Sorry.
So how can these be used to – what's the problem?
If they can't be used to track people within a meter, what's the problem?
What's the problem?
So there's an assumption that happens when these new secure cards come out in any instance where,
oh, well, now that they've got the card and the pin, we're safe.
So there's no issues with using this card for identifying individuals.
And in reality, and as the Chaos Computer Club showed, if you can copy these cards, you can do anything you can do with an RFID card and impersonate someone.
So if I'm walking down the street and I get scanned by an RFID skimmer, I could pick the information off this card,
just like you could do with U.S.-enabled – RFID-enabled credit cards, U.S. passports, and impersonate that person.
So if I operate a store or even if I just am standing on the street, I can know everybody who goes by?
With U.S. credit cards, yes. I'm not exactly sure with the German situation.
All right. So there must be a solution.
There is a solution. I started a company back in 2005 that makes RFID-blocking wallets and passport cases and badge cases.
And what it's got is a very straightforward shield that blocks low- and high-frequency RFID skimmers.
So from the low-frequency stuff at 125 kHz all the way up to the 1356 MHz cards, and those are the most common.
And we've been selling them since 2006 and have been working with Off the Hook and Hope and WBAI and that whole story since then.
So I put my passport or my credit card or my German ID or if I'm a Houston student, my ID, I put it in – it's a wallet?
Yep. You put it in the wallet or the badge case, and the signal to read it is attenuated,
and the card cannot reply and the backscatter can't be read.
And that's that. It just blocks it using an old Faraday cage.
And do you have a wallet?
Yeah. I actually brought a wallet and a little skimmer today.
So there's this contraption. I don't know. I would describe it, but I can't describe it better than it's a contraption.
Yeah. It's very interesting looking. It's like something out of 1970s Doctor Who.
And I think – what can you tell us about what this does?
So today I made an attempt at making the world's cheapest RFID skimmer, and I think I pulled this one off for just under $40.
It's got a parallax 125 kHz card reader on it and then three components, a transistor, a transformer for the battery, and then a little bell that beeps.
And what the parallax card does is it's got an antenna integrated into it, and it'll read 125 kHz cards,
and then spit out – instead of a data stream, it spits out a beep stream.
So what I'm going to do now is hold a card up to it, and you might be able to hear it beep.
Why don't we put the microphone near it?
Sure.
It's very exciting. There's an evil-looking red light from where I sit.
We can't hear it right now. Sorry.
Well, anyway, so it's supposed to go beep, beep, beep, and that was the card being read by the RFID.
You did it before. It really did work.
I've now seen the red light. Oh, there we go.
Why don't we put it –
It's a little too quiet.
Why don't we put the microphone near it?
It now has more microphones than most senators.
Than the rest of us. Just put it down.
Remember, we're listening for a beep, ladies and gentlemen.
So it sounds like the speaker or something is broken, or our microphones are broken,
but it was working before, and anyone with $40 can –
Can put together an RFID reader, and basically, instead of having it beep out,
which it unsuccessfully did today,
what it would do is you could plug that into a serial port or anything else
and read the unique identifying numbers on this 125 kHz card.
Now, there's different types of RFID cards.
There's ones that have encryption technology in them.
There's higher frequency ones that you can read from sort of a more directional piece,
but the basic theory is pretty straightforward.
You activate these cards, send some information to them, and they send it back to you.
It's pretty straightforward to copy these signals and repeat anything with these cards.
But you don't have to understand the technology of the card in your wallet.
Your wallet just blocks all of them.
Yeah, so the Differer wallets just block it, so there's nothing fancy going on here.
It just makes a Faraday cage around your card, and the signals don't come in or out.
And when you need to legitimately use the card, you can just flip the wallet open,
and it works as normal.
So you just flip it out, and the cards are read.
Dot red is here.
I just want to ask one question for the listeners who maybe don't know what a Faraday cage is.
Oh, sure.
So Michael Faraday, a famous researcher from a long time ago, has some interesting pictures,
if you Google him, where he sits in a very large cage that fully encloses him,
and sort of lightning bolts go on and off this cage, and it shows electromagnetic shielding.
So that's what these products do.
I think actually Emanuel had the experience of sitting in one of those at the Maker Faire about, what,
three weeks ago now, a month ago?
So he was sitting in a giant wallet.
Right.
He was sitting in a giant wallet.
Mike, I have a question about the wallet.
Sure.
I like to, with my Dutch transport pass, which is just this little chip,
I like to just throw my wallet over the sensor.
Will I still be able to just brush my wallet against the sensor?
So the other version of the brushing is the butt turn, where you keep it in your back pocket
and you just kind of bring your backside up to the reader.
Our wallets, we have a couple different versions.
One of the versions has an outside sleeve that you put cards in that you care less about.
So some people really don't care if their work badge gets copied,
but they care a lot if their credit card gets copied,
and they can put it in there and you can still do the brush.
That's useful for the transit cards as well.
So if you're going in the Oyster card in the U.K. or the PATH train here in New Jersey.
So we have some of these wallets.
You were generous enough to donate them, but not to people in the studio, to our audience.
And they can get one if they call us at 212-209-2950.
It's a number you've all heard us say before because it's a WBAI fundraiser.
And what will they get if they pledge?
You guys get your choice of a leather RFID blocking wallet from Diffware
that does all the stuff we just talked about.
Yes. You get a leather wallet for a $75 pledge to WBAI.
If you're not interested in the wallet, we will substitute happily an archive of Off the Hook on CD.
But for a $75 pledge, you can get either the archive or the wallet.
And if you're a little more generous, for a $125 pledge, you can get both of them,
both the wallet and our archive.
What's the number, Rob?
The number is 212-209-2950.
And of course you always get the station.
And of course you get the station.
That one comes with any donation.
That's the main thing you get.
You get WBAI, you get Off the Hook, and you get dozens of other really interesting shows
about material that you're not going to hear anywhere else.
So please, call 212-209-2950 to support this kind of broadcasting.
And we don't get any of this money.
This all goes right to WBAI, which has to pay electric bills
and all kinds of other stuff to keep this station on the air.
Hey, I have a quick question for Mike about these wallets.
Sure.
And anybody else, I wanted to know, you know, we're getting all of these kinds of cards
and things issued to us, and I can think of a couple great reasons why you'd want to protect
maybe information that's stored on the device.
But also, if you're issuing the device, are you required in any way to make,
is your RFID supposed to...
Uh-oh.
He asked the wrong question.
I guess we lost him.
I don't even know what the question was going to be.
I don't know what the question was either.
But he's totally gone.
I have a question.
If the wallet is partially open, will the RFID signal still leak out?
I have heard about some wallets having that sort of problem.
I'm sure some listeners maybe know a bit about this and are thinking about donating
but aren't sure yet, might be wondering about that.
Yeah, sure.
So the way we design ours, it affects the backscatter.
So if the wallet's slightly open, it's not a problem.
And I don't know if you guys were at Hope last year, but we have a nice demo
where we hold the wallet open slightly and it still blocks it.
But when you fully open the wallet, it's not blocking it anymore.
You can still read the cards.
The U.S. passport, there's some sleeves that go around it where if it does open slightly,
you can get in there and get the 1356 MHz signal to read.
Because they're not actually shielding it.
They're just holding it closed.
There's also a bit of geometry here that goes on.
So if a card's being held perfectly parallel to an antenna,
it's not going to read it.
So that helps you a bit as well.
We have no calls.
I can't believe that.
People don't want these wallets.
212-209-2950 is the number to call and show your support for the station
as well as to get this premium that Mike and Differware are donating to us.
And I don't know.
We're going to have to pitch until we get some calls, I think.
Bernie, why don't you pitch?
You're very good at it.
Oh, I don't know about that.
But, hey, I just would like to say that you've never heard a…
Oh, no.
Okay.
I don't know how to work this phone.
What do we never hear?
That was my fault, so we'll call Bernie back.
I think he was getting into how you've never heard a radio station
with as diverse a set of voices as this one.
And for that reason, you should support the station.
Absolutely.
He's going to get into that.
I listen to WAI podcasts a lot because I'm on the road
in different places in the world.
And I always, every now and then, realize that I'm in some strange place
in the world and that I'm still listening to radio from my favorite station
in New York that I've been listening to since I was a teenager.
And I just think we know that we can do this,
but it's still very kind of exciting and special.
Yeah, and also our listeners may have noticed that for a couple of weeks
we've been taking a break.
We haven't been on the air, which means we haven't been able
to contribute our efforts to the station's fundraiser,
and it's not going on for too much longer,
so we've got some catching up to do.
So we're depending on you, our listeners, to make sure we can remain here
on this wonderful time slot on this awesome station that we would not have
were it not for listeners just like yourself.
So if you pick up the phone and call 212-209-2950 and pledge,
you can become part of the process.
You can contribute to this show on this station
and make sure that we still have this available.
They're very sexy wallets, by the way.
They are. They're very cool-looking wallets.
Just as wallets go, it's pretty neat.
Are there non-leather options? Did I ask the wrong question?
No, we do. We have a vinyl, vegan-friendly wallet that we did.
Wow.
212-209-2950 is the number.
I think we have Emanuel back with us.
Yeah, I'm back on my phone now.
Apparently, GSM coverage is not great on the island, which we're still on,
so we got cut off.
But, you know, I was just thinking, listening on the radio,
which I can still listen to, and that's a godsend
because everything else is failing, but the radio is always there.
I was just realizing how much we cover in a typical hour.
Just this hour, we've been talking about technology
that we're not supposed to know about,
i.e., car computers and restricted technology.
We're just supposed to grin and bear it and hand over the money to corporations.
We're talking about how to get around that.
We're talking about ways to rebel against that.
We're also talking about ways of dealing with border guards
who don't view us kindly,
ways of actually entering our own country without getting harassed,
or if we are harassed getting into our country, we talk about it,
we share stories, and ask a ton of questions.
And now we have these amazing anti-RFID wallets
that tie in so perfectly to what it is that we're all about.
And I realize, you know, this, along with the archives
of all the off-the-hook shows and a lifetime subscription
to all remaining off-the-hook shows,
this is a microcosm of what the hacker world
and what the WPAI world is all about.
So I really feel the need to ask listeners
if they can think of any good reason not to call
and show support for this kind of thing,
because I don't think it could be summed up more perfectly
than the things that we've been talking about in the last 40 minutes or so.
This is important.
This is important to any individual out there
to ask these questions, to stand up, to be counted,
and to have the voice.
And WPAI is our voice.
It is vital.
We're broadcasting off the top of the Empire State Building.
That costs money.
We have to support the station, or we lose the voice.
And by losing the voice, we lose all kinds of things that go along with it.
212-209-2950, pledge $75, and you'll get the RFID wallet.
Pledge $75, you'll get the off-the-hook archive and lifetime subscription.
Pledge $125, you'll get all of that.
But you have to call now, 212-209-2950.
As Rod T. Firefly was saying a few moments ago,
we haven't been on the last few weeks,
and we do need to raise something for the station.
Or it looks like we don't have any supporters out there.
I know we have plenty of supporters.
We meet them all the time.
Everywhere in the world we meet listeners,
people who have had their lives changed by the radio,
and it's an important institution to support.
Please, let's get some calls coming in.
There should be four or five, six calls coming in right now.
212-209-2950, get the anti-RFID wallet,
get the off-the-hook archive, support the radio station,
and show your support and voice your support.
It's vital, it really is.
It's just amazing to me that there is a public radio station
in New York City of all places.
In so many parts of this country, we've lost that,
and it's so difficult to get it back
because to be able to get a license from a commercial radio station
that really doesn't want to give it up, it's near impossible.
The fact that this has been going on in New York since the 1960s
is just astounding, and it's because of the listener support,
and it's because people want to keep this kind of unique voice on the air
and want to have this diversity of programming.
When you call in and support WBAI, you're not just supporting our show,
although we thank you for calling while we're on the air,
but you're supporting the entire station.
You're supporting everything, all the shows on it.
So really, call in.
We have great premiums tonight, but support the station
because it's really important that it's here and that it stays here.
I'm currently breaking the law, even being on the radio right now,
because I'm in a car driving, and I don't have a hands-free unit.
I'm putting myself at great risk, both physically and also legally,
because I believe in this place.
I will break the law to support WBAI.
Yes, that's what I will do.
I'll put myself in harm's way.
We're not asking you to do that.
We're simply asking you to pledge your support.
212-209-2950.
Guys, be honest with me. How many calls are there?
We have two on the line now.
We had three a moment ago, but we should have five.
So 212-209-2950 is the number to call.
And one of those people on the line had a question for Mike,
which is that, are the wallets...
Can you put your passport in these wallets?
Are they big enough?
Oh, so they're not.
But we do have passport wallets.
And if you want one of those, we'll arrange it with John,
who can get you guys a passport wallet.
Same thing.
Okay.
So just make sure to mention that, I guess, when you're pledging,
that you want the passport wallet, not the regular one.
And you'll be mentioning that, of course, to the people
who will answer the phone when you call 212-209-2950.
And if you do end up getting the regular wallet,
not the passport wallet,
you can always just take a hammer to your passport and get rid of it.
That's actually an interesting concept.
So those passports are government property.
And if you read the fine details, you're not actually supposed to do that
because that's illegal, just like cutting up money.
What? Cutting up money?
But it's totally legal to put it inside one of your wallets, right?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Because you're not tampering with the actual passport.
You're not breaking government property.
Our hosts may violate the law, but we don't want our listeners to.
What about if you doodle on your school desk?
Is that when you're violating property?
I just wanted to mention that this station has been on the air
for about 50 years now.
And the radio landscape has changed so much since then.
It was just by the randomest correlation of events
that this station was even able to start back then.
It was by donations.
It was by the generosity of certain people.
And it is not something that would ever happen again.
We've managed to hang onto this station, onto this chunk of the airwaves,
for 50 years only because of you.
We don't sell T-shirts.
We don't have bake sales.
This is our only income.
And if we were to lose hold of this radio station
that we've managed to keep hold of for this long,
it would not happen again.
This would not come back if it disappeared.
And I personally don't want to see that happen.
So I need you to call 212-209-2950 if you agree with me
and if you think that this station is serving a purpose.
And I wanted to mention that when Rob said this is our only income,
it's not our personal income.
None of us on this show have ever profited a dime personally from the show.
The point is that the radio station itself is a fantastic medium.
Radio, even though it may seem old school,
it's a fantastically effective medium for reaching a maximum number of people
for the lowest possible cost.
Right now, Emanuel is listening to it in a car radio.
Alternatively, he could have some sort of mobile broadband device.
He'd be probably paying at least $60 a month to receive the stream,
and then WBAI would have to upgrade its server capacity to stream more.
Radio makes a lot of sense.
We can reach four states just from the top of the Empire State Building.
And, of course, we're also streaming online,
which many of our listeners listen to this show and other WBAI programs as well.
But the point is this is an amazing resource for information you're not going to get.
No other radio station is going to cover this.
No other just Internet radio station covers all this kind of stuff.
So we'd like your support.
This is a community that you probably feel is worth supporting since you're listening to it now.
So I'd like you to call 212-209-2950.
We've got a couple of great thank you gifts.
Again, we've got the Differware RFID blocking wallet for a pledge of $75,
and we also have a DVD with all the back episodes of Off the Hook going back to 1988.
That's also available for a pledge of $75.
We can get both of those for $125.
But in any case, if you can't even afford that much,
just call the pledge to support this station, 212-209-2950.
Can I just say a couple of words about the archive?
Because I don't know if we've devoted very much time to what the archive actually is.
But basically when you pledge $75 for the Off the Hook archive,
you get every single show we have ever put out since 1988, and all in full FM quality.
But not only that, you get every show in the future that we put out in the same format.
Once a year, we send out another DVD filled with the previous year's shows.
Now, there is so much history that goes along with this radio show.
When we first began in the 1980s, the phone network was completely different.
The Internet was in its infancy.
Civil rights still existed to some degree in this country.
All kinds of other things that the kids of today and tomorrow are going to need to know.
And it's vital to have that at your fingertips and to be able to hear in full FM sound
what radio was all about, what matters, what the issues were.
You'll hear Kevin Mitnick when he was arrested, when he was released.
You'll hear the fiber optics story, you'll hear a burning story.
When he went through all his trouble in various federal prisons,
federal and state prisons throughout Pennsylvania, all kinds of stories being told.
And, of course, you, the listeners, calling in with all sorts of questions and tales and advice for us.
It's an incredible time capsule that you can bet for a steal tonight.
212-209-2950, $75, gets you over 20 years of radio, of weekly radio.
And I don't know how long we're going to keep doing this for, but if we do it another 20 years,
you'll get another 20 years worth.
If we do it another 40 years, however long we do it, you'll get it into the future.
212-209-2950, a pledge of $75 gets you all of that.
A pledge of $125 gets you that, plus the wallet.
And, of course, a pledge of $75 gets you just the wallet, if that's all you're interested in.
But you have to call now, 212-209-2950.
And, of course, we don't have any clips tonight, but we've played clips in the past of the archives,
and some of it's just kind of astounding.
Listening to you exploring the phone network at times and hearing,
well, this kind of system makes this kind of tone and all that, and it's all in there.
And this show has inspired people as well.
We've had comic books written as a result of someone listening to the archives.
And so there's just a lot of history in there, and it's really great.
So call, pledge, help the station, and get a nice gift with it at the same time.
You just have nine minutes left if you want the wallet from Drifterware or the archive and subscription or both.
If you're not listening to us live, that's very sad because you won't be able to get these premiums.
But if you want to go online and pledge just to support the station anyway,
you can do that at wbai.org slash favorite show.
But if you are listening live, if it's just before 8 o'clock on a Wednesday in New York,
and you're listening to us live and you want these premiums, call us, 212-209-2950.
And also for those of us who listen to the show on MP3s and podcasts and things,
if you can't listen live, you can still call live if you work out whatever time it is near you,
when it's 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern here.
And even if you can't listen to us live, call in and ask the volunteers who answer the phone,
and they'll tell you what premiums we have that week.
I wanted to add something about the radio station and its impact.
I've been listening to Off the Hook since you guys started streaming online,
and I actually pledged one time and got to listen to some of the audio
when I couldn't actually hear it because I live on the West Coast.
So please call the station, 212-290-209-2950.
It's crucial to keep hearing because that's a chance to speak about these issues.
We've got the RFID wallet, and that's something we can offer you in your support of the station.
Okay, I think we're losing Kyle again.
But yeah, as Bernie mentioned earlier, none of us make a dime from the show.
All the money goes straight to the station.
We're all volunteers.
We only have premiums like these wallets because of the awesomeness of people like Mike from Differware
who donate them to us on our behalf, donate them to the station.
And the archive is donated by 2600.
He doesn't get any money back from that.
Yes, and in fact, if you don't like us, donate a lot because that's a lot of work for us to construct these archives.
So make us work for it.
And if you do like us, all the more reason to donate, of course.
We're glad to help you to show our thanks if you like us, 212-209-2950.
Only a few minutes left.
Hey, Mike, I wanted to ask you, with this new mandatory RFID ID card in Germany,
have you had increased interest in your RFID shielding wallets?
Yeah, absolutely.
We actually just spent the last year in London setting up distribution throughout Europe,
and Germany was the first port of call.
My partner over there, nerdlabs.de, is in Frankfurt,
and they're fielding calls from police agencies, individuals, quite a few folks who are interested in securities.
Police agencies?
Yes.
So the police badges have had the chips in it for a while before the national identity badges did,
and they're interested in this.
So the cops want privacy for themselves, and they want to spy on us?
Yeah.
Isn't that how it works?
That's why you can't take pictures of them.
Is that too direct to phrase it that way?
Maybe.
I think it might just be policy around the cards being issued, but that could be possible.
Also, the Chaos Computer Club had some fun at the airport in Frankfurt,
making copies of individuals' badges at the airport
and then finding their ways into secret areas of the airport and taking pictures and then going on the news.
They're a pretty daring bunch over there, and that kicked up a lot of interest in Germany.
In the U.K., some of the national identity cards there are being issued with RFID as well,
and that started in April of this year.
And here in the United States, some listeners may have heard of the Real ID Act,
which is a piece of federal law that's basically compelling states to embed RFID functionality into driver's licenses and state ID cards.
There's only a handful of states right now, Mike, I think, that have this.
Isn't that right?
But it's coming.
Yep.
So it's up to the states at this point, and some states have elected to put it in, particularly states along the border,
because a lot of folks are allowed in and out of Canada with a state ID card.
Wow.
So it's important to call 212-209-2950 tonight to get your RFID blocking wallet
so that you can put your state RFID driver's license or ID card in there
and not worry about somebody grabbing your ID info secretly.
Please call 212-209-2950. Support WBAI.
All right. I think that'll have to be the last word.
That's it for this week on Off the Hook.
You have a few minutes left to call in and pledge your support and get those great gifts.
But otherwise, good night.
He was disdained for pure mathematics
And his unique geometrical insights
Left him well-equipped to face those demons down
He saw that infinite complexity
Could be described by simple rules
He used his giant brain and he turned the game around
And up below the storm
He saw a vision in his head
A bulbous pointy form
He picked his pencil up and he wrote his secret down
Just pick a point called z in the complex plane
Let z1 be z squared plus c
z2 is z1 squared plus c
z3 is z2 squared plus c
And so on
If the series of z's will always stay close to z
And never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot set
Mandelbrot set
You're a Rorschach test on fire
You're a diggy glow pterodactyl
You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You're one bad-ass big old fractal
And you're just in time to save the day
So even on a fearsome way
You can change the world in a tiny way
A man who rots in heaven
At least he will be when he's dead
Right now he's still alive
And teaching math at Yale
Gave us order out of chaos
He gave us hope where there was none
His geometry succeeds where others fail
If you ever lose your way
A butterfly will flap its wings
From a million miles away
A little miracle will come to take you home
Just take a point called z in the complex plane
z1 be z squared plus c
z2 is z1 squared plus c
z3 is z2 squared plus c
And so on
If the series of z's will always stay close to z
Another trend the way that point is in the Mandelbrot set
Mandelbrot set
You're a Rorschach test on fire
You're a diggy glow pterodactyl
You're a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You're one bad-ass big old fractal
And you're just in time to save the day
So even on a fearsome way
You can change the world in a tiny way
And you're just in time to save the day
So even on a fearsome way
You can change the world in a tiny way
Come on, change the world in a tiny way
Come on, change the world in a tiny way
WBAI
Oh, that show off the hook is fantastic, I tell you
Not many shows better than that