Our technical production team at KPFA and Berkeley is Scott Pham and Jane Chang.
Thanks for listening today.
In San Francisco, I'm Danny Wood.
And you're listening to Radio Station W, BAI, New York.
The time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum.
We're in the right place at the right time.
Greetings to Mike.
Hi.
Red Hat.
Hello.
.Ret.
Hey.
Jim.
Hi.
And Bernie S. down there in Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Well, did we all have fun yesterday?
Did we all get to play with the, actually, Bernie, you're, you've been voting the same
way on a different type of system.
Yeah.
Since 2004, Philadelphia, the city of Philadelphia, has used an electronic, a black box proprietary
electronic voting machine.
No paper trail, all proprietary, so it's a big, it's a big, it's a big, you don't fill
in any paper.
There's a big membrane keyboard that's about two feet wide and three feet high.
And they put a, like a Mylar overlay showing, you know, what candidates you want to press
the button for.
And you press the membrane and a red LED lights up behind the template.
And it really takes, it took me like 10 seconds to cast all my votes.
It was great.
Well, of course.
I don't know if my vote was counted.
That's good.
But we all, of course, support the paperless trail because it saves trees and we're environmentalists
here.
And everything that can save a tree when possible is a good thing, right?
Do you have no idea how many toxic chemicals go into the making of all these electronics,
do you?
Well, at least we're not using them year after year.
We're not making new ones year after year.
We're using the same black box systems that nobody knows how they work.
But how would you know?
They're black.
How would you know?
They're black box.
You can't see what goes on inside of them.
For all you know, it's a copy.
Well, you have to have some, you have to have some faith in the system.
And that's, I think, what we all had to have a little bit of this year, especially in New
York.
Now, I'm certain, Mike, you're going to tell me you had no problems at all.
I had only one.
All right.
Let's hear it.
I had to bring my ballot into the thingamabob.
There was a man trying to be helpful, but he was standing awfully close to me.
You had that guy, too.
I think everybody had that guy.
It was ridiculous.
And you have, in the part of New York State that is not New York City, there's something
called a privacy sleeve.
I don't know if it works.
Oh, you didn't get a privacy sleeve?
No, they don't exist in New York City.
I had a privacy sleeve.
You had one?
Oh, yeah.
I didn't get offered one.
I had no privacy at all.
Really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Maybe somebody took all your privacy sleeves.
I had a privacy sleeve and a privacy little boothy thingy.
Yeah, but you did a provisional.
No, I had a...
It was the same ballot.
I had a privacy booth.
Yeah, but you must have been out of time.
Yeah.
Privacy sleeve.
Let me just say, this was the most half-assed system I've seen yet, because when I went
in there, the people running it had no idea what was going on.
They were arguing amongst each other whether they should be giving one or two ballots to
this person that was voting provisionally.
Right.
Why would you give somebody two ballots?
But apparently that's what they had been doing all day long.
That's weird.
They had lost count.
They weren't checking off the right things.
They were yelling at each other because they couldn't find a vital piece of paper.
If any of the votes got counted, I think it would be pretty incredible.
The thing about the provisional ballot person, they're not putting it in the machine anyway,
so it's not like it would get double counted.
I did a provisional ballot because I'd moved, so I wasn't voting in where I was registered.
But it was the same ballot.
I got the same ballot.
I went, I did the same thing.
The only step that was different was rather than putting it in the machine, I put it in
an envelope and put my information on the outside, which is kind of funny because it
takes away from the anonymity of voting.
But I assume because it's on the envelope, they probably figure it out if it's valid
or not and then take it out and throw it in a pile or something.
I don't know.
For those of you listening in other parts of the country, it might seem kind of strange
because New York has had these old clunky voting booths, which you actually would go
inside.
You'd have some privacy.
There's no privacy anymore.
You basically walk up to this desk and you're standing there in the middle of a room with
a whole lot of other people at similar desks.
I had a guy walk up to me and ask for a pen while I was voting because apparently somebody
had stolen the pen from his booth.
Right.
And that's not how you're supposed to vote.
You're supposed to have some privacy.
You're not supposed to have people looking at you while you're voting.
Well, I mean, do you want them to make a thing with a curtain that you then write your vote
in?
I don't see why they couldn't combine the good parts of the old system with what is
deemed necessary for the paper trail.
I think they could easily do that.
I think you're asking for too much.
Yeah, I'm asking for something that's sanctity of voting, which was completely lost yesterday.
I mean, I had no trouble filling out all the little dots and things like that.
A lot of people did.
People were in tears.
This is my third try, my last chance after this and I lose the right to vote.
To fill out all those little dots takes time, even if you know exactly what you're doing.
You have to look at each one.
You have to make sure you fill it out right.
God forbid your pen touches outside the little circle there.
You could be looking at an overvote situation.
Did anybody experience an overvote in this system?
See, I'm curious.
I almost did it intentionally just to see what would happen.
But basically what happened was when you overvote, you get some kind of message on the machine.
What I'd like to know is does it tell you exactly where you overvoted or do you have
to figure it out?
Do you look at your ballot again and try to figure out what you did wrong or do they take
your ballot and you have to start over again not knowing?
I think it comes back to you, doesn't it?
I mean, that's what, when we were talking about it, I think was it Gus who went to the,
she went to the thing where they showed you how it worked and it just returns it to you.
It returns it to you.
And I think it says which, I don't know, I didn't do it.
I didn't use the machine.
Because the machine only has a couple of lines.
It just says your vote has been counted.
There's really not much more it can say.
So I'm not sure.
Maybe the person, that nice, helpful, nosy guy that was helping Mike will look at your
ballot and say, oh yeah, this is what you did wrong.
You voted for Cuomo.
You were supposed to vote for Palladino.
Something like that.
Who knows?
My understanding is that if you vote for more than one candidate, it will go to the majority
party.
What?
No, no, no, no, no.
That is what they were telling a lot of people.
No, no, no, no.
It rejects.
Let me, let me, because you said something that's almost right, but also totally wrong.
Well, it sounded like something that was completely wrong to me.
Yeah.
New York state is one of eight states in the country to have something called fusion, which
means that, that fusion, Cuomo was on the ballots like 17 times.
He was on for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party and maybe a couple
others that I'm forgetting.
17 times.
Close enough.
It was like three or four.
Three times.
Three is almost 17.
Okay.
And you see how we have trouble voting.
All right.
Go ahead.
All right.
So, so if you vote for Cuomo on more than one line, what the machines are programmed
to do is count it as a vote for Cuomo, which is presumably intended, but it only counts
it on the Democratic line, not on the Working Families line and whatever else he's on.
So if he's running for both, say a Democrat and liberal, and you vote for both for some
reason, which you couldn't do in the old system, it wouldn't let you, it'll just count it once,
but it'll count it for the majority party.
Right.
But if you vote for Cuomo and Palladino, then your ballot's supposed to get rejected.
Now, here's a question I have, and this, this was always something that was very clear on
the old system.
You know, the Supreme Court justices vote for any four of, of these, uh, of these people.
You've seen those, right?
Yeah.
I couldn't, I skipped it.
Yeah.
I never vote for anybody who's, who's running both Democrat and Republican.
I never vote for them, but, uh, usually there's like four columns, maybe even more, and it
goes down a bit too.
So it goes over and it goes down and says, vote for any four.
Now, I wasn't sure on the paper ballot.
Can I vote for people in the same row?
It doesn't have to be horizontal.
You know the answer to this?
I think you could.
I don't understand your question.
Your ballot's also rotated 90 degrees, which is confusing me even more.
No, it's very simple.
It's very simple.
No, no, no.
But in New York, in New York City, it goes across and in New York State, New York State,
not the city, it goes down.
So I'm confused when you say left, right.
Let me, let me, let me just explain for any listeners who also might be confused.
Basically what you have is say four Supreme Court justices, name one, uh, Democrat, uh,
and through name four Democrat, then the next one underneath that is Republican, then whatever
else.
So my question is, can I vote for any four going down or do I have to vote for any four
only going across?
That's my, that's my question.
I think you could vote for any combination within that.
I'm sorry, say again?
I think you could vote for any combination within that.
I don't think so.
I think you can.
I don't think you can because I seem to recall the old machines would not physically allow
me to do that.
I don't think you can, you can.
But maybe the new machines are higher tech.
You can vote just because they're next to each other in the, for the justice position.
Just because they're next to each other doesn't mean anything.
They're in alphabetical order or something within the party.
Well, you see, the thing is, I was afraid to try because I didn't want to get the overvote.
I don't know.
I'm kicking myself now.
I should have done it to see what would happen.
I mean, worst case, you had two more chances, right?
Uh, yeah, that's true.
But you know what?
I'm kicking myself for this.
I'm proud of myself for what I walked out of there with.
I took these little cards.
I don't know if I'm supposed to have these.
These are the cards you show the guy at the scanner, uh, that, uh, allows you to give
him a ballot.
This is another thing that we didn't have in New York City.
Yeah.
And, and it says number two on it.
And that means I was in election district number two.
But the thing is, I found those in my little voting booth.
Somebody didn't give it to him or he wasn't asking for them.
And I think what I could do is probably sell those outside and give people the right to
vote.
All they have to do is slip inside.
Well, they'd still need a ballot.
And it was really easy for people to slip inside.
Or wouldn't they still need a ballot?
Uh, yeah, I'm not sure where those came from.
Don't you only get the ballot when you sign your name?
Um, yeah, maybe, maybe theoretically, but I'm not, I'm not entirely sure.
There was so much mayhem there.
I'm sure I could have walked out with a handful of ballots.
It was actually, I was, um, I went to a place, I think there were four districts voting in
my polling place.
It seemed pretty fine, I mean, but I got there kind of late, but there wasn't any mayhem
or anything.
Well, all I know is it took me a half hour to vote and I didn't have any problems.
Whereas usually it takes me about a minute and a half to vote.
And this is, this is, I had to wait on a little bit of a line.
It wasn't a huge line, but just the process was so cumbersome and clunky and it didn't
feel right.
And I heard a lot of people saying, it doesn't feel like I voted.
It feels like I'm just taking some kind of stupid testers or something like that.
But apparently there were a lot fewer problems this time than during the primaries, probably
because the poll workers had gone through it already.
Yeah, well, that's not too hard to accomplish.
This conversation I'm hearing does kind of worry me a bit because then it makes me think
about the results we've gotten with some of these candidates.
Is it, was it caused maybe by, did certain people get in because of all this confusion,
people crying?
It was caused, it was caused by stupidity.
All right.
And that's something that's never in shortage in this country.
I'm sorry if I'm talking down to anybody, but really, I mean, come on, these are the
people you want serving you?
Not our listeners.
Our listeners are very smart.
No, not our listeners.
Listeners, you know the people we're talking about here.
You know some of them.
Some of them are your relatives.
Some of them are your friends, people you went to school with.
I mean, make a call tonight and say, really, guys, this is, this is, this is what you want.
All right.
Hey, Emanuel.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
We had a very close U.S. Senate race here in Pennsylvania.
It was, ended up being 49 to 51 percent.
So we have no way of knowing here with these machines in Philadelphia, which by the way
are a Dahoner Controls Electronic, get it, Electronic 1242.
For our listeners that want to look at this machine, it's pretty interesting, I set up
a shortened URL, go to tinyearl.com, 29VXFRY, and you can see the EFF has a page set up
at that URL where you can, they took apart this machine and they analyzed the EPROM cartridges
and everything.
It's, it's, it's interesting how the machine works, but there's no way to verify that the
data is accurate or has been tampered with.
So I don't know.
Maybe we got the wrong U.S. Senator.
My candidate lost by one percent.
So I'm wondering, you know, I really feel angsty about this.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we don't need to get into this again, but it is nice, at least with
the New York machines, that you could have a paper recount if you wanted to, because
the trail does at least exist in that case.
And it's not what the machine printed out.
It's not anything like that.
It's actual piece of paper that you filled out and went in and dropped into a box.
So that is, that is the nice part.
Yeah.
Well, actually, the whole part of scanning was kind of weird.
It took so long that we had to both sit there watching, waiting to see if it was approved
or not.
I'd never actually used a double scan thing before.
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to give it to them when one side facing up or the other
side facing up.
Yeah, they were, they were going around at my polling place saying that it didn't matter
what way you put it in.
And then you have to slide it yourself with your hand for some reason to get it to go
in.
But yeah, it was a moment of triumph when it actually said the vote had been counted.
You know, I almost high five the guy.
Such an accomplishment.
Whereas before it was so, yeah, you just pull the lever and walk out.
And that's how it worked.
And hopefully it didn't malfunction.
Yeah.
Bernie, anything else?
My voting, the poll where I had to go was very, very interesting.
It's an old longshoremen's union hall.
And it's just like walking into an economic time machine.
And but one nice thing though, is they had set up these huge paper posters that were
like two feet wide by three feet high that were exact duplicates of what the big membrane
were, membrane keypad cover inside the voting machines.
You could look ahead of time at exactly the layout before you go into the voting booth
and see, you know, where each candidate's place was on this big membrane and so forth.
So I went in, it literally took me 10 seconds to know what buttons to press, where to light
up the LEDs.
So I thought it was very easy to vote.
But my concern is, I don't know if it was recorded.
Well, it was very easy for you to go in there and push some buttons.
You don't know if you actually voted.
That's the difference right there.
Here's an interesting piece that showed up in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg.
I vote religiously, but I can't say that today's trudge was an occasion for transcendent ecstasy.
It's not like November 4th, 2008, the memory of which made today all the bleaker.
For me and pretty much everyone of my political leanings, the main glumness generator obviously
is the looming national outcome.
But as if that weren't bad enough here in New York City, the very act of voting has
been robbed of its tactile pleasure.
We have a new way of voting.
It's modern, it's digital, it's whatever.
But it lacks the grandeur that our old voting machines brought to the experience.
I rhapsodized about those machines two years ago.
Our machines, this is the old machines, our machines weigh 800 pounds.
They're tall, the size and shape of a confessional.
You go behind a calf-length curtain and pull a big three-foot-long lever from left to right
like a gondolier's oar.
It goes chunk.
The candidates are laid out before you in neat columns with an inch-long black teardrop-shaped
lever next to each name.
You snap the levers down, chunk, chunk, chunk.
You survey your work.
You pull the oar back from right to left, chunk, most satisfying.
But not this time.
This time you're given a piece of paper, roughly legal size, tucked into a Manila privacy folder.
You take your folder to a flimsy-looking two-person lectern-like contrivance equipped with a pen
on the end of a string.
My pen was not on the end of a string.
My pen was someone's pen that was left there.
And blinders to keep your neighbor from peeking.
Well, they peeked when they walked over to ask for the pen.
You stand there leaning over and try to make out the names and party labels, some of which
are in type the size of In God We Trust on a dime.
You fill in little ovals the size of FDR's ear on that dime.
You put the piece of paper back in the Manila folder.
You walk over to what looks like an ATM screen with a slot under it.
You take your paper out of the Manila folder again and slide it into the slot.
On the screen, a circle whirls for five or ten seconds.
Your vote has been counted, it says.
The only saving grace is that it doesn't say, have a nice day, because there's no way
I'm having one of those.
And that again from the New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg, very apropos, I think.
By the way, I'd be curious if anyone knows what they've done with those voting machines
and if they're going to sell them at some point.
Yeah, that would be something.
Because I would like to have one.
Yeah, I'd love to have one.
There are a whole bunch featured on a recent cover of 2600 as part of a salute to old technology,
things that are on the way out.
And now they're out.
It's kind of sad.
They could just scrap them, but it would be kind of nice if they were auctioning them
or something like that.
Well, we can ask.
Bernie, you were saying something?
Yeah, they sell them to other countries.
Other countries?
Really?
Yeah, they sell them to other countries.
They get more for them than the scrap metal.
I think they sold some of them to Mexico.
So who knows where these things ended up.
Okay.
Well, here's from some of our listeners who had some experience.
The first issue I had at my polling place today was the ballot being several inches
longer than the privacy folder.
Then there was someone standing right beside each of our two ballot scanners offering to
quote, help, unquote, rather than standing back.
The black felt marker bled through the ballot.
Even holding the ballot face down, it was quite obvious whether I had voted top line
Democrat or not.
Finally, a beloved figure of this region affixed an I voted today sticker on my parka.
Two inches diameter, red, white, and blue, little stars around the circumference.
Are you kidding me?
After voting for any of these corrupt sleazes, I needed to take a shower, signed John.
I didn't get a sticker.
Yeah, I know.
I'm not sure how that happened.
I saw some people with stickers, actually.
You what?
I saw some people with stickers, actually.
Really?
Did you steal one and give it to me?
No.
No.
Since you have spent time researching slash discussing the new voting system in New York,
I have a question you may be able to answer.
At my precinct table, there was a person working the sign-in ledger and a person handing
out slash explaining ballots, sleeves, et cetera.
For the voters ahead of me in line, the person with the book started filling out the voter
card and then the person with the ballots finished filling in the card.
The person directly ahead of me in line was not registered and very confused, so the ballot
person spent several minutes explaining to her how to register for the future and cast
an affidavit ballot today.
During that time, the person with the book looked me up, had me sign in, and completely
filled out a voter card for me.
Then the ballot person quickly handed me a ballot and sleeve and another voter card.
The only difference between the two voter cards was the ballot number.
They were different but sequential.
I think that's what I have here is the voter card.
I think that's what it's called, what I stole.
After I noticed I had two cards, I figured only one corresponded to the ballot I had.
I checked the ballot pretty thoroughly but didn't see a number.
I went back to the table and explained that they had each handed me a card and wondered
which one I should use.
I was told that either one would be fine.
I nudged a bit and asked if the ballot number on the card wasn't supposed to correspond
to a numbered ballot.
I had noticed the ballot person checking what appeared to be the stubs left on the ballot
pad after he separated each ballot and wrote the number on the voter card.
No again, I was assured that my vote would be tallied just fine.
I didn't believe them, but I was tired and hungry and didn't feel like making a major
case out of it.
After some reflection, I realized that the ballot number on the voter card probably didn't
correspond to the actual ballot, otherwise voting wouldn't be anonymous, but just the
stub so that as long as the number of ballots given out matched the number of stubs left
on the pad without ballots attached, everything would add up okay.
For example, if 100 people signed the book and 100 ballots were given out, it wouldn't
matter if the handwritten numbers on the voter cards were all random, similar to the way
handwritten tickets in restaurants work.
So why have the cards at all and do the cards play some role if more ballots are scanned
than are signed for?
Signed Nick.
Anybody have an idea for this?
I think he's talking about the cards that I found lying around and I don't think anyone's
taking those very seriously, but they might serve an important purpose.
I know that they're handwritten in New York City, but that doesn't answer any of his questions.
I guess we don't know.
That's the answer to your question there.
And finally from Louis, not a fan of the new system, no privacy, ridiculously small type,
referendums hidden on the back.
Pulling the lever on the old machines truly brought a feeling of joy to me tonight.
I felt like I was sending a fax while I, Louis, I don't know why sending a fax doesn't
fill you with joy too.
It does for me, but uh, I guess the last time you sent a fax, I don't know, uh, it happens
occasionally.
People do.
People do want faxes.
They want me to fax a copy of my credit card.
It's ridiculous to prove somehow that I'm me.
And of course when you Xerox a credit card or try to fax it, it comes out completely
black or unreadable and then they want me to do something else.
Maybe that's the trick.
It looks realistic.
They know it's fake.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I don't know.
I think I understand why we as hackers have an affinity for electric, for voting machines
in general.
Um, because some of the earliest computers are really electronic tabulators, but I think
Charles Babbage were, uh, maybe that's not the right guy, but, but some of the early
machines were invented for, uh, for tabulating census data.
And uh, which is kind of similar to voting from a standpoint of, you know, taking the
people's information and making public policy decisions from it.
Um, so, you know, I think voting machines have a, uh, have a sort of kinship with computers,
um, and having, you know, been their predecessors.
So I think that's one of the reasons we have an affinity for them.
Well, another reason we have an affinity for these things, I don't know if affinity is
the right word, uh, the way I'm using it, but, uh, uh, we just like to play with technology
and see what makes things break and see how things are actually designed.
And you know, I don't mean that in a destructive way.
You have to test the limitations, you have to see where the security holes are, and that's
what hackers do.
Of course, we get demonized for that all the time, but if you don't experiment and don't
find the limitations and the weaknesses, somebody else will at some point, and they might not
tell anybody when they do.
Um, our email address, oth at 2600.com, hear it off the hook, we get all kinds of mail.
Uh, last week we got, um, we got some, some critical mail and I like to, I like to focus
on the critical mail even more than the positive mail.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's always fun.
Uh, okay.
This is, this is good.
Um, this is from Bill.
Bill.
Uh, sometimes it's interesting to listen to your show sometimes, uh, but a comment your
leader made today, I'm sorry, I just never been referred to as a leader on the air before.
That's kind of funny.
A comment your leader made today made you guys out to be snobs.
Uh, you were talking about the cable vision slash Fox blackout, which by the way is over
now.
The cable vision slash Fox war has ended.
I think cable vision begrudgingly gave in.
They won't tell us.
Nobody will say what the terms were.
And I think that's a final insult is to, is to subject people to this and then not even
tell them how it got worked out or what's being paid.
I think cable vision ended up paying them more money.
Well, they're going to say they're not happy and Fox is going to say they're not happy,
but they're not going to give the actual numbers.
I think the viewers, the customers are entitled to know exactly what's going on.
Anyway, uh, you were talking about the, uh, cable vision, cable vision Fox blackout and
said something like get a life in regards to people wanting to watch the world series
on television.
I don't much care for baseball or television, but a comment like that is just lame.
There was no need for you to make a comment about people watching television or sports.
That's not what your show is about.
Would you rather that we were all glued to a computer screen?
What's the difference?
Television or a computer?
Well, let me, first of all, uh, just, just so we know what we're talking about here.
Uh, this was written before the show was posted online.
So, so basically, uh, bill, you're relying on what you heard, um, uh, without listening
to it again to see what the context was.
This is exactly how it was phrased.
It's just so crazy and ridiculous.
I, I, it's, it's funny, but it's also this, this means something to a lot of people and
I, I sympathize with them.
I do want to say get a life and do something else, but, uh, I understand that people want
to see the world series and they can't and, uh, it's because of a, a corporate span.
I would say that to just about anybody doing something that involves being inside, uh,
whether it's, uh, uh, being at a computer or, uh, or, uh, just, uh, puttering around
the house, get a life, do more, do more with your life.
It's, uh, it's, it's meant in a sarcastic way.
So I, I, you know, I would say get a sense of humor, but I'm sure that would be taken
out of context as well.
Let's finish reading the letter though.
Uh, really it's all the same.
We are way too addicted to both and neither serve to improve the way we get along as humans.
It's all mediated.
I'm sure you think you are doing so much good for the world by hacking or whatever you do.
Now there's a, there's a bit of a, um, uh, an assumption there.
Yeah.
You know, we're not just, uh, sitting around hacking into systems, uh, trying to improve
the world or, or whatever it is that, uh, the mass media makes it out that the hackers
do.
Um, anyone not doing that is a loser in, in, in your eyes.
I would say maybe you should get a life and get off your high horse, Mr. Hacker dude,
and maybe get outside more and get some fresh air and hang out with regular people for awhile.
Maybe even go to a sporting event and relax.
Do I not encourage people to do things like that?
Maybe not going to a sporting event, but definitely getting outside and, and, and getting
a life.
I say get a life to more people.
Wasn't that the whole point of starting the meetings for people who don't have lives and
conferences and, uh, this various, uh, various activities, conferences of thousands of people,
lots, lots of human interaction and maybe, uh, continuing with lighter here, maybe get
outside more and get some fresh air, hang out with regular people for awhile.
I said that already.
I'm sorry.
Uh, it's not necessarily a waste of time.
Uh, no, it might even be constructive.
Please don't tell anyone to get a life.
It makes you out to be elitist jerks.
WBAI already has that reputation in many circles.
Maybe you are, although you seem smarter than that.
Didn't he just tell us to get a life?
He did, but we shouldn't do it over the radio.
Uh, would it be acceptable, it's finishing up here, would it be acceptable to listen
to sports on the radio?
If you have a problem with television, then don't give advice on how to beat this blackout.
Well, a lot of thoughts there, a lot of assumptions, but seriously, it's incredible how one little
sentence can, this is like, this is like when I criticize guns.
When I say, when I say people's fixation with guns are really unhealthy and people need
to do all kinds of other more constructive things and educate themselves.
I always get this hate mail from, from gun enthusiasts saying that I'm, I'm, I'm saying
that a mass gunman or, or, or troops should come into their homes and take all their guns
and register their names and things like that.
And you know, it's, it's the same way of overreacting to a simple statement saying, you know what,
this is a problem, this is something that needs to be, uh, uh, done differently.
Well, people always can pick, find things to, to jump on and criticize without, you
know, I mean, it doesn't serve any purpose, it's just kind of going in circles.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
But thanks, uh, thanks for writing.
We, uh, we do appreciate the mail.
We, we like the, the critical mail as well.
They're probably not listening.
Oh, I think they probably are.
They probably are.
Probably, they're probably...
They're waiting for something else to email us about.
They're probably typing a letter right now, even as we speak.
Should we give our, what's our email address?
mthat2600.com and our phone number.
You can even call us and yell at us in person.
212-209-2900.
Yes.
2900.
The one where we don't ask you for money because we're done asking you for money and we want
to thank the people who, uh, pledged so generously over the last couple of weeks, uh, did quite
well.
And, uh...
Pay your pledge.
Yeah.
You gotta pay, pay the pledge too.
That's, that's a very important part of the whole, uh, the whole thing.
Uh, now here's, um, here's something interesting.
Um, um, actually there's a number of interesting things here.
Um, this is, uh, who here has an iPhone?
Anybody have an iPhone?
You have an iPhone, right Hector?
Okay.
Uh, there's a security flaw on the iPhone according to, uh, to, to Wired Magazine, uh, that allows
strangers to bypass the handset's lock screen with a few button presses.
Uh, now there's a video and...
If I could just show you.
You know, it's, it's, it's my fault for, for not loading this beforehand.
Here.
Why don't you just explain to the folks?
So basically the, the, the thing is that, um, in the lock screen where it asks you to
enter your passcode, um, if you go to emergency call, uh, and type whatever, some random number
because it doesn't, you know, it's not like it actually specifies 9-1-1 because it doesn't
know what country you're in.
Um, and then if you hit call and power very quickly, um, it drops you into your contact
list, uh, which then you can make a phone call from.
Um, that's about all you can do.
I mean, basically you only have access to the person's contacts, um, voicemail, uh,
a keypad for, for making phone calls, but, um, and, and their photos because if you wanted
to assign a photo to a contact, then you can go through all their photos.
So it doesn't actually give you full access to the system, which I think was a flaw they
had in an earlier release like a few years ago.
But, uh, you can definitely make a phone call with someone's locked iPhone.
So, uh, go through the process one more time.
You have, you, you borrow someone's iPhone, you find an iPhone that's locked and all you
have to do is...
So you go to, you know, you swipe the thing across to get to the unlock thing, but instead
of typing in a passcode, you go to emergency call, uh, and from there you type in some
random digits, it doesn't matter what, um, and hit the call button and then quickly hit
the power button on the top.
Um, and it will, I think hitting the power button basically cancels that call, but then
rather than dropping you back to the lock screen, it drops you into the, their, uh,
their contacts.
All right.
I actually, uh, not saying that you didn't do a good job explaining that, but I would
like to play the actual audio from the person who discovered this.
As easy as that.
Wow.
I mean, you know, if anyone's interested in actually doing it and didn't understand my
explanation...
I thought that was in English.
I'm sorry.
I really thought that was in English, but, uh, obviously it was.
But one thing I don't understand, looking at the video, it was, it was reversed.
He held the iPhone up and everything was backwards on it, so I don't know if...
Then he flipped the video.
He took the video in a mirror.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
That makes sense.
He did what?
Took the video in a mirror.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
So he didn't have a camera guy holding a camera up to him.
Right.
Okay.
All right.
I guess that makes all the sense that that makes.
But I mean, yeah, it just basically enables you to call, make phone calls with a locked
phone.
And you can't actually easily get out of the, um, the contacts without actually placing
a call.
Once you try to place a call, then, and hit end, then it'll drop you back to the lock
screen.
But you can make a call to all those people.
You can make a call to anyone in the, in the...
But only, only in that list.
No, no.
Keypad 2 is available.
Keypad 2.
Okay.
Amazing.
Yes, Bernie, go ahead.
I see a bigger risk in this.
Go ahead.
I mean, I, I, I go into various, uh, government buildings cause I like to see what they're
up to.
Uh, our, our federal building here, federal courthouse and, uh, uh, the, uh, the Philadelphia,
uh, justice building.
You go into there, you have to check your cell phone at the security gate with a security
guard who's actually a sheriff's deputy and he gives you a receipt and you have to show
your ID and then he puts your phone in the back room.
And while you're doing your business in the building, um, ostensibly they don't want you
to have a phone in there because you could be taking pictures with it in the courtrooms
or whatever.
So, uh, ostensibly they could be pulling all your phone book address information out and
writing it down.
I mean, you know, maybe I'm just being paranoid, but you know, I think paranoia is just good
thinking when people are out to get you.
Or just calling their relatives in other countries.
That too.
But couldn't they do that anyway with a cable or something?
No.
When you connect, if it's locked, you have to, um, unlock it, um, to, to sync with, with
a computer.
Uh, Bernie, have they, have they found those, uh, 280,000 medical records that were missing
in Pennsylvania?
No, no.
Some, uh, unbelievably.
Um, maybe it's not that.
Oh, come on.
Really?
Unbelievably?
How many times have we reported a story like this?
Uh, way too often.
We could do it.
You know what?
Let's, let's do it every week from, from this point on until you tell me to stop.
I'm going to find a story like this every single week just to show you how, how, not
unbelievably this is.
Well, here, here, here in, uh.
I've already been asked to stop.
Here, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, uh, that the names, addresses, and, and personal
health information of 280,000 Medicaid recipients have, uh, gone missing.
Um, it was on a flash drive.
It was on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a, on a,
It was on a flash drive that was owned by a couple of, uh, health insurance companies like
the Keystone Mercy for Kind, a藥物品藥品市場, which is a Apollo project.
We call it the K-Dot Keystone Mercy, and Graph comprends all of the Medicaid projects, including
They're both owned by Independence Blue Cross.
And anyhow, it's not clear why they had these 280,000 Medicaid members in Philadelphia,
Bucks County, Montgomery County, Delaware County, and Chester County all on this flash
drive.
But somebody lost it.
They take them to community health fairs to demonstrate stuff or to log people.
I don't know what they do.
But they take them to health fairs, and somebody dropped the thing.
So somebody at a health fair found a flash drive with almost 300,000 people's crucial
medical information.
You think this would be like a HIPAA violation or some sort of federal law violation, but
I doubt very much anybody's going to get punished over this.
And people are at risk.
All their personal information can be used to steal their identity now.
So here's the thing that's really, really dumb about this is that there are, so while
I think it's kind of crazy that they're putting 300,000 medical records on a flash drive,
there are actually flash drives out there that are encrypted and tamper-proof and all
that that they could buy.
They're not that much more expensive than regular.
If they actually have a legitimate reason to put really sensitive data on a USB drive,
at least then if it gets lost, they know that no one's going to get access to the data.
And but I mean, so I think that, I mean, they should be held responsible because really
if you're going to carry that kind of data around in the first place, you should at least
take measures to ensure it doesn't, it can't be decrypted should you actually lose this
little piece of hardware.
Do those products actually work?
I mean, it's better than just putting it on a regular flash drive.
Well, what's better is complying with the law and not putting it on any flash drive.
But I mean, in theory they work because they filled the thing with resin so the chips break
if you try to tamper with it and there's encryption chips and all that stuff.
I just feel like I read often about ways in which these things are not nearly as secure
as they're cracked out to be.
I don't know if they're, I never hear about the ones that actually work.
I mean, there are ones that have like government, you know, the government allows to use them.
So if you don't like hardware security, there's always a simple using encryption, encrypting
the data on your machine before you put it on or encrypting it on the actual drive with
software, like GPG or something.
It's clear that the people who are putting people's medical records on flash drives in
the first place, like don't have sufficient respect for the privacy of the individuals
contained in these records to take the extra step of running encryption software.
Sure.
Yeah.
I'm not saying, you know, what they're doing is right, but I'm just saying that if they're
going to be idiots, they at least could, you know, be smart about it.
All right.
Speaking of flash drives and things like that, have you heard about this dead drops?
Yeah.
It's a new project that this guy is running throughout New York where basically puts USB
flash drives, sticks them into walls, buildings, and curbs accessible to anybody in public
space.
There's a picture here of a flash drive sticking out of a cement wall.
And what you're supposed to do is plug your laptop into it, into a wall, house, or pole,
and you can share your favorite files and data.
Every dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project.
Dead drops is still in progress to be continued in New York City and in many other cities.
There's all kinds of documentation ahead.
And basically there are five places, five places that we're going to tell you where
these things are.
87 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, Empire Fulton Ferry Park in Brooklyn, 235 Bowery in Manhattan,
Union Square in Manhattan, good luck with that one, and 540 West 21st Street in Manhattan.
I guess that's Eyebeam headquarters right there.
And yes, you guys are waving your hands.
My only concern with this is that if anyone can put anything on it, there's a lot of malicious
things that can be put on there.
And it's not so difficult to put something on there that, say, a Windows machine when
connected will run automatically and then...
That goes exactly into what I was going to say, which is if you want to participate in
this, you might not want to use a Windows machine.
Well, I mean, you know, there's dangers with all systems, but yeah, that immediately comes
to mind.
Or high voltage.
Well, no, I think it's an actual USB drive just sticking out of...
So it's not like it's connected to mains.
It's a USB, it's a male USB connector.
You don't know what is on the end of that.
That's true.
Somebody could connect a 120 volt wall outlet at the other end of those conductors and you
hook up your computer and poof.
Yeah.
It's just, it's kind of like...
It sounds like a great idea in terms of kind of an art project, but in practical terms,
it seems kind of dangerous to me.
Bernie, I think you just inspired somebody.
They're going to vandalize one of these things.
It's going to blow up people's data.
The thing also is that, you know, it's not like somebody maybe intentionally would put
something on one of these drives, but there are viruses out there that, you know, when
you put a USB drive into the computer, it copies itself to it.
So someone who doesn't know that they're infected with a virus could actually, you know, spread
it that way.
All right.
Our telephone number is 212-209-2900.
We're ready to take listener phone calls.
It's been a while since we've been able to do this, at least a month.
So we'd love to hear what opinions are out there, what experiences people have been through,
thoughts about voting perhaps, or technology, things like that.
While we're waiting for the calls to come pouring in, here's one more letter.
Dear OffTheHook, I'm considering a trip to Panama sometime in the near future.
Is there any information that has been assembled all in one place regarding GSM phones in other
countries?
Specifically, I'd like to know if it's possible to get a SIM card after arriving in a particular
country.
I'd then like to insert that SIM into an unlocked handset, and this is safe to do this.
So I can do local calling during my visit and avoid insanely expensive roaming charges
from my American-based carrier, AT&T.
For example, I know such a thing is possible in England.
Unlocked handsets and prepaid SIMs are much more common over there.
I brought three different travel guides about Panama, and from what I've read, it's possible
to rent phones from the airport, but I hear it's more expensive.
Other rates can be had from the mall in Panama, so I'm told.
As an aside, I think it would be useful to start providing information like this to the
travel guide publishers.
They might even be willing to pay for such information, signed Michael.
I know, Mike, you had some input on this.
Yeah.
There's a really great website called GSM World, I think.
You didn't include my response with the actual URL?
No, I didn't include your response.
I figured that was in your head.
All right.
Well, I think it's called GSM World, and they have, for a lot of countries, they have a
list of all the mobile carriers in that country, and their rates for prepaid cards, so you
can compare.
But unfortunately, it seems that Panama is not on that list.
There's another site which is run by the company that invented GSM that has a list of GSM providers
in every country, and then you can go on the websites of the individual carriers, but it's
a lot more work, and you have to speak the local language.
In general, when you go to a foreign country, what's the method you use?
Do you go to the websites of the local carriers and see if they say anything, or do you look
for other companies that might offer different discounts?
I usually just try to find a place in the airport.
That's usually my thing.
I mean, a lot of airports that I've been to, they'll be a store that sells SIM cards.
I mean, I don't know about Panama, but at least in Europe, generally, when I've gone
there, I've just gone and looked for a store in the airport.
At the very worst, in town.
In Malaysia, we found something that was so incredibly cheap that involved dialing in
special code, and then your voice would be routed over VoIP, but you paid something like
two cents a minute to get to the States on a cell phone.
How did you dial from the cell phone without ... I don't ...
You would dial the code, and then you'd dial the number that you were supposed to call,
and it would route it differently.
Oh, it would change the provider somehow?
Apparently, yeah.
Something like that.
That's cool.
They told us about this at the store, but that's not-
So you were using your American SIM, but dialing some different number?
No, I was using their SIM.
Oh, okay.
You can usually, or at least often, get a better rate if you don't buy it in the airport.
If you go to a small shop, that's going to tell you what the best deal is.
I did that in Amsterdam, and I wasn't happy with the results, because they billed me twice.
When I called them to ask them about that, they say, yes, we bill you twice, as if that's
like something that is normal.
What I was supposed to do is I was supposed to get a credit on my SIM the next month,
which was great if I was there the next month, which I was not, and it expired six months
later.
I was completely ripped off by going to a small shop.
Maybe the lesson from that is go with the second cheapest provider and not the cheapest.
I think the best suggestion is to ask around and see what people say, because people tend
to lead you in the right direction.
Mr. Emanuel?
Yes, go ahead.
There's a trick I've used in several different countries.
First, I have an unlocked GSM phone that I take to countries outside the U.S., and then
I buy a prepaid SIM card that seems reasonably priced, and then I also buy a prepaid phone
card, the kind of card that says, call USA from pay phone, hotel room, whatever, which
is like a VoIP service, costs a few cents a minute, and I use them in conjunction with
each other.
Basically, I use the prepaid SIM card in my unlocked GSM phone to call the local number
on the prepaid phone card, which is usually a couple of euros for the card, and then I
can call back to the U.S. for a few cents a minute, and nobody seems to have caught
on to this, at least in a widespread way, but it works really well.
Okay, so ask and you shall get many answers, oth at 2600.com.
Let's take some phone calls, 212-209-2900, and good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Speak up.
Hi, how you doing?
What's on your mind?
I'm the elections inspector that has called you a couple times in the past, but just for
clerical sake, I jotted a couple notes down as you spoke.
So Eric, you said they had the ED number two card.
All that is is a card, let me ask, at your voting location, did they have several different
election districts there?
Yeah, they had a few.
So that's a card to decipher and help people organize that you do not go into another voting
district with your ballot, although it wouldn't take it, right?
Okay, so how would it know not to take it?
You're saying another district in the same room or another district in a different room?
Not ED number two.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Okay, you're saying the ballot said election district number two somewhere on it.
I'm under that impression.
I believe the ballot because they give us books of ballots.
And I'm going to jump down to another category.
We account for all the ballots that we can account for.
If a voter leaves with a ballot, we're supposed to say, well, you can't take that, but they
may leave with one and we may not have control of it and they can go down the road.
So at the end of the night, we even count the ballots that are still in the books that
haven't been opened in the ballot books.
Interesting.
Going back to the cards, though, how is it I found these cards in the ballot area and
nobody had used them apparently?
Because they are supposed to be handed to you and you hand them back.
It gets monotonous and it's going to bring me to something else.
This new system is so ridiculously laborious for the elections, board of elections.
Yeah, I was getting that from there, from their looks.
And from the voters, for the voters, too.
It's a little ridiculous.
The privacy sleeve, it's what I call high tech cardboard.
It's just a piece of cardboard that folds in the middle.
And what you do, you put your vote, your ballot in there and you can scoot it through with
your fingers with those little squares cut out on the one side, if you're not squeezing
too tight with the other hand.
That's all it is.
So that while somebody's assisting you with the machine, they don't see your vote.
So they did come up with something.
The only thing, you can put your vote in upside down and it will register.
It will read.
I hope so.
But there's, at least in New York City, there's bubbles on both sides.
The propositions were on the back.
So I put my ballot in upside down, but the man could still see how I voted on the propositions.
And that information is probably going to be used in some way.
Could be.
In the future.
So I think basically what you're saying in terms of those cards you collected is they
were just an organizational thing.
So you have different districts and different, probably I would assume the ballots are coded
in a certain way.
Maybe not in a way that you can read.
It could be some sort of bars on it, barcode or something.
And then the machines are coded to accept certain districts because that's what those
are tallying up.
And so it's just a matter of, oh, you know, so that they can direct you to the right machine.
But if you know, oh, well, I had a card that said two, they can say, okay, well, it's that
machine.
You don't actually need the card.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that makes me feel a little better.
The pen is a different issue, though, because I could easily have simply replaced the pen
there with a red pen, which wouldn't have worked.
Somebody would have wasted a lot of time and had their ballot negated.
Or maybe one with invisible ink where the ink comes off after a few hours.
All sorts of fun.
Ours was tied to the-
Ours were not tied.
Either they trust us more or they trust us a whole lot less because somebody stole them
already.
I don't know.
The caps were tied and you could pull the pen off.
So you could put it in your pocket and let it bleed into your blue jeans.
The caps and the pen were completely freestanding.
I was surprised that one person wrote in and they said they had felt markers.
Yeah.
Mine was a felt marker.
Really?
I had a regular ballpoint pen.
There's a big argument going on as to whether or not you're supposed to use pencils.
Somebody said they were using pencils and it wasn't working.
And of course, everyone who's taken a test in New York State or anywhere has used a pencil.
The ballots are optical.
Yeah.
But the ballots, I think in this case, it's actually scanning and taking a picture of
the ballot.
And so it doesn't really matter what the material is as long as it's the right color.
Okay.
If I may?
Yeah.
When you asked about overvoting, the machine doesn't go into detail about overvoting.
It just says you overvoted.
So how are you supposed to find out where you made a mistake?
Pull the ballot back and the ballot will come back out to you or you hit the button that
says return and it will come back out to you and you look at it yourself.
Do you look at it there standing in front of the scanner or do you go back to your little
polling desk?
You can go back and come back and resubmit it.
But it doesn't decipher how much you overvoted.
The only thing is whatever category you overvoted it gets eliminated, but the other categories
do get submitted.
Right.
Well, it was frustrating people because they didn't know what they were making a mistake
in and they kept going back and the same thing was happening.
Can I say one quick thing to what you were saying about number two pencils?
Yes.
The reason those would be a bad idea is because then the paper trail could be erased.
That's a good point too.
Which is I think probably why they said to use pens.
Nice, nice.
All right.
But wait a second.
Brad, you said that you could take your ballot back.
Oh, you got my email, didn't you?
Yeah, yeah.
So you say you could take, if it said you overvoted, you could take it back to the booth
and how do you correct your error if it's written in pen?
And then how do you know like when you go back, oh, I see.
So when you put the thing back in again, it won't count the other votes.
It'll only count.
How does it know you're putting the same ballot back in or is each ballot have like unique
code on the corner?
You're not.
You get three chances like baseball.
You do not get more than three ballots, but you're allowed to get three separate ballots.
Not all together.
You get one and if you did it wrong, we take it back.
We fold it face in, in half and we write spoiled and we actually black out the barcode so it
cannot be scanned.
And we keep it and we account for it and have a count at the end of the night for spoiled
ballots and we'll give you a second ballot and we're going to write in the stub number
off the ballot book that we gave you of that ballot that we gave you.
But I don't think I see a stub number on the ballot itself, so it sort of doesn't work
for me.
Did anybody strike out yesterday?
Three strikes?
No.
Did anybody struck a, got a drive, you know, or they, if it says you overvoted, they'll
opt.
We'll say, well, you can bring it back and do another ballot or we don't have any more
and you could see a judge and they'll opt or you can press, um, the green button and
it will, it will submit it, you know?
So the problem will be, uh, that category will be taken out, but the rest of your vote
should be read.
I do want to say, I can't say that's gospel cause I don't know for a fact.
I know that's what the board of elections has taught us.
Okay.
Red Hat, one more point.
Then we got to move on.
We have a lot of other calls.
I want to bring it down to the hacktory and have it checked out.
Yeah.
Bring it down to a hackerspace.
Okay.
We have no more.
And the new machines are not, they're non-confessional.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I miss the old ones, but, um, well thanks.
Thanks for the info.
And please keep, uh, keep letting us know what happens.
I try guys.
I'd like an old machine, but I'd like to have someone from the opposite sex inside running
them with me.
Okay.
You can go into detail on that on another show.
Uh, good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello?
Yes.
Go ahead.
Uh, this is Donald from Gulfport.
Welcome.
You're on the air.
Right.
Go ahead.
Let me turn the radio down.
Yes.
Let me turn the radio down.
Okay.
Donald has turned the radio down.
He's returning to the phone.
Right.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
I'm on the air.
All right.
I'm on the phone now.
All right.
Donald, welcome.
What's on your mind?
My mind is I've made a pledge in June for the complete Next Hope conference and paid
it by a credit card, and it's now November, and I've tried to reach WBI without success,
and I don't know what next to do in order to obtain those.
Uh, well, do you have access to email?
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
Email us at oth at 2600.com.
We'll try to track down that pledge.
You definitely should have gotten that.
Oth.
At 2600.com.
If you pledged that long ago, you certainly should have gotten something by now.
I didn't.
Okay.
Obviously, the most recent pledge drive and the one in, I believe, August might be still
a few more weeks to go, but if it was back in June or May, we should definitely figure
that one out.
Yeah, because I made your archives.
I pledged that, I think, last October, and I received it in July with a note saying we've
held it up because one of the books was not available, but I didn't order a book.
Oh, dear.
So that's almost eight months or nine months, so I'm kind of puzzled.
The strength around here is doing radio, unfortunately, well, I guess fortunately, and not so much
doing mail order, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get what you pledged for, and we
strive to make sure everybody gets what they pledged for, albeit late sometimes.
So email us.
When you email us, make sure you include your name, when you pledged, what date it was.
You did pledge during the show, right?
Not after the show?
No, I pledged the very first night you mentioned it, but I can't remember that night.
Okay.
Because sometimes what people do is they pledge at a different time of the week, and like
we say, we can only offer the premiums during the show, so if we didn't get those names,
that would be the reason why we didn't get the names, but it sounds like you did everything
right, so you should definitely get what you pledged for.
All right.
I'll contact you.
That's oth at 2600.com.
We'll be looking for that email.
Right.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
It goes to anybody else who pledged, and most of all, we want to thank you for your pledge,
because that's what keeps us on the airs.
We don't ever want to take that for granted.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Hi.
I just wanted to share my voting observation.
One thing I noticed was sticky fingers.
I voted early in the morning, and I had a privacy sleeve and plenty of markers, and
then I went back with my girlfriend right at the end of the day, and they were all out
of privacy sleeves.
They had one marker left, and they were cool markers where you click the end like a ballport
pen and the thing comes out.
Oh, I didn't get those.
I got the kind where you can take the cap off, the old ... Yeah, whatever those are.
What time did you vote?
I voted pretty late.
I voted about 7 or 8 o'clock.
I bet you some people went home with some souvenirs.
I'd like to know how somebody was able to walk out of there with a privacy sleeve.
I thought I was going to get jumped for carrying those two cards out, but the privacy sleeve
is pretty big, and obviously, when you hand it to that nosy guy at the scanner, he's going
to take it, so I don't know how people got around that.
I would have taken one if I knew they were ... Give me.
Yeah, you see, there wasn't ... The old system, you couldn't take anything.
I just had a manila folder that had privacy sleeve printed on it.
I didn't have a little slidey part.
Really?
They just gave you a folder?
Well, but you didn't use the machine at all.
I didn't use the machine.
So, of course, it's different.
Oh, maybe.
But they don't have the sleeves for people ...
But why did they give me a privacy sleeve at all?
Wait, what did you insert it into, then?
No, I put it in an envelope.
Oh, you just put it in ... Okay.
I had an affidavit ballot.
Yeah, that's an envelope.
That's not a privacy sleeve.
No, but, I mean, it looked the same as all the privacy sleeves anyone else at my polling
place had.
They don't have privacy sleeves in New York City.
I think you're confused.
They had one.
No, they had one in my polling place.
You see, the contention is growing as to just exactly how the voting is working here in
this city.
You gotta have what I'm voting.
It had privacy sleeve and big letters.
Think about it.
Confusion.
Confusion reigns.
Final word, caller.
Oh.
Yes.
You had a final word?
Okay.
I guess not.
Dot Red, go ahead.
I think all the confusion, all this extra labor and crap going into this just shows
that buzzwords is not necessarily a good idea, just because this new voting system is called
electronic or whatever E you want to stick in front of it doesn't mean it's more high
tech.
Yeah.
I didn't really see much in the way of electronics except for the scanner, and, you know, it's
not really...
It's definitely more high tech, but I would say maybe it's not as efficient.
Yeah.
It's definitely not as efficient.
I think we can all agree on that.
Go ahead, Mike.
No?
I do have a correction, though.
I gave the wrong website.
Well, give the right website.
It's prepaidgsm.net.
It's the website you should go to.
Okay.
Let's take one more phone call.
Oh, I'm not giving the phone number out because this is the last phone call.
Good evening.
I'm going to turn off the hook.
Speak up.
Hello, Emmanuel.
Hello, everyone over there.
Hi.
Just a quick thing.
I was talking about...
You guys were talking about the 300,000 IDs, the medical IDs that were kind of lost in
a convention somewhere.
Yeah, in a health fair.
Yeah.
I was actually looking for a quick piece of advice.
I'm part of a group in the public sector working at a college, and I received an email with
about 180 people with their names and social security numbers on it in a PDF file that
the payroll department spit out.
I'm wondering where I can go to kind of slap somebody on the wrist for that.
Any idea, Bernie?
I would find out who sent it to you and find out who's ahead of their organization, and
if it's a really big organization, they have a chief privacy officer.
You want to talk to that person.
All right.
That's going to have to be the last word because we are out of time.
I want to thank everybody for calling in.
Remember, our email address is at the bottom of the screen.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us.
Thank you.
Bye.
So
Ah, very good, very good, perfect timing I say, perfect timing I say.