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The time is 7 o'clock, time for Off The Hook.
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And getting started for the program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined this evening by Mike.
Hi.
DotRet.
Hello.
RedHack.
Hello.
Voltaire.
Yo dawg.
And Kyle.
Howdy.
Jim over in the corner there.
Hello.
And Bernie Estein of Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Well, we are back after one week off and after three weeks of fundraising.
I want to thank everybody for calling in and for pledging for the amazing things we were offering.
And just to keep this place going, it was a lot of fun for everybody.
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Judging from the number I see on the screen there, I think the station did well overall.
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Please email us.
You've been waiting longer than six months.
How about that?
Because otherwise it's just too many people.
It just doesn't move that quickly when you have a whole lot of volunteers and so many programs to deal with.
This is a lot more complicated than any NPR station, let me tell you, because we have over 100 radio programs.
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But we do try and get everything out there.
But write to us, oth at 2600.com if you've been waiting for a long time.
One update, though, that I do have to remind people about or tell people about.
We've had significant problems with the Tesla coil premiums we offered back in October.
We just haven't gotten the material from Architect, the organization that we were working with.
So we're probably going to have to offer some kind of a substitute for that.
There's really no way around that, unfortunately.
We just haven't gotten the T-shirts and the video material, I believe, that we were offering.
So that's something.
If you were waiting for that, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll work something out where we can get you something else.
Everything else, though, you should be getting exactly what it was you pledged for,
including what we were offering last couple of weeks, which was the special WikiLeaks package.
And, boy, that's caused a fair stir around here.
We're still compiling it. We're still putting it together.
And if you pay your pledge, then you will be getting that in the mail.
And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Yeah.
Okay, we have some late-breaking news.
This actually is unfolding right now, late developments with Bradley Manning.
I believe, Mike, you know the latest on this.
Well, Bradley Manning, who's the soldier who was charged with leaking classified material to WikiLeaks
that we've now allegedly—the material that we've now all seen.
And he was charged just a couple hours ago with 22 new charges,
the most serious of which is called aiding the enemy.
And that is a potential death penalty charge,
although the prosecution has said they are not currently interested in the death penalty.
Well, they're not interested in it, but the judge might be interested in it.
The judge might be.
Yeah.
And so it's really unclear who this enemy is that he's allegedly aiding.
I guess it's us, right?
Our country has a lot of enemies, so it could be us, too.
I've been called enemy of the state many times.
He could be aiding people that are immune to cats.
I don't know what that means, but, yeah.
It's a petty allegation to Julian Assange.
Do you want to explain it?
Yeah.
And Daniel Schmitz—I'm not sure his official last name.
Daniel Berg.
Excuse me.
Daniel Berg.
Domscheit-Berg, actually.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg.
Yeah.
In his new book, which is—
Inside WikiLeaks, which sounds like this when you drop it on the table because we have a copy.
It's not that—you're making it sound heavier than it is.
Well, it's a couple hundred pages.
It's a weighty book here, but, yeah.
You don't want to get hit with this.
But, yeah.
There's mention of Julian's cat in here or something.
This is what you latched onto?
This is the important part of the book?
No, that's not what I latched onto.
That's what he latched onto to announce Julian Assange was having things rather petty.
Uh-huh.
All right.
Mr. Schmitz's cat notwithstanding.
Yeah, let's get back to something that's important here, namely the charges against Bradley Manning.
It's taken them all these seven months to figure out that he's allegedly aiding the enemy
and at least some more time to explain who the enemy is.
Uh-huh.
I'm seeing five counts of theft of public property or records, two counts of computer fraud,
eight counts of transmitting defense information in violation of the Espionage Act,
a count of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet,
knowing it would be accessible to the enemy.
And that's the one that apparently carries a death penalty.
Five additional charges are for violating Army computer security regulations.
What do you think, Bernie?
Well, I think that the enemy is us when the U.S. is speaking of the enemy
and releasing information to us.
So that's a scary thought.
I suppose so.
Any other words on this, Mike, from the stories?
I mean, I'm just sort of amazed that this is in addition to the charges he was already charged with.
And how many charges were those?
I don't have a number, but there were some pretty serious charges in there of, you know,
improper handling of classified material and all this stuff.
So, you know, Adrian Lamo at our conference, who turned Manning in,
said that he believed that Manning would get no more than six months in prison,
and that was clearly wrong because he's been there for more than six months already.
He hasn't even been charged yet.
Well, they say the new charges more accurately reflect the broad scope of the crimes
that Private First Class Manning is accused of committing.
That's according to Captain John Haberland explaining these new charges.
Now, if convicted, he could face a life sentence in prison.
That's assuming the death penalty is off the table.
Before these charges were brought down, the maximum jail time was 52 years.
Now we're looking at life.
So things have gotten significantly worse in the last 52 years.
52 years is pretty bad as well.
52 years is bad too, but he's a young guy, you know.
So this is life.
This is probably more than life he's facing.
It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.
And, again, for what?
There's no evidence that I've seen in any way that any enemy, whoever that is,
has benefited in any way from any of this.
The only thing that's happened is the government looks bad.
I think something that you'd need to look at too is what's happening in various parts of the world,
things that have been tied, however indirectly, to the leaks.
If you look at certain cables, you see that governments, including Gaddafi's government,
including the government in Tunisia, including the government in Egypt,
have all been implicated in these cables as being corrupt, as robbing the people,
things that kind of get people in a bad mood against governments.
And I see Hillary Clinton out there saying how great it is that people are rising up against tyranny.
Well, you know, maybe revelation of the truth helped to create that environment.
It can be a good thing. It doesn't have to be a bad thing.
And we seem to only be looking at it as a bad thing when related to WikiLeaks
or to Bradley Manning or to any of that.
Voltaire?
If anything, it essentially helped national security because before this,
this stuff was marked as not very secret.
There's like the lowest levels of, lowest two levels of classification.
And before these were released, it had the amount of people that it had access to,
which I think over two million.
Yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people had access to this information.
You can be like 99% sure that somebody, one of those two million people,
was selling it to like foreign governments and stuff.
To real enemies, yes.
And now there's a more equitable distribution of information.
They're not likely to tell other people that they're doing that.
Exactly.
I think this is very interesting.
These charges, these new charges, I haven't heard anything about it,
but it sounds a lot like they've been adapted for this,
but there's still punishments and consequences for a very old form of espionage.
And this is much different.
This is a leak of information to a stateless entity, which is like the world.
Yeah, I mean if you wanted to charge somebody with espionage,
usually the way you would go about it,
you'd catch them selling state secrets to a foreign government, to an enemy of some sort.
This is a situation where someone is being accused of leaking something to everybody
so that the whole world can see just what's going on.
Very, very different.
It's very hard to equate it with something that we might be used to
as far as what spies might be charged with.
Emanuel?
Yes.
I just want to say the charge of espionage, I think,
requires that it be defense-related information.
And I think, I'm not sure who it is,
but one U.S. senator has recently proposed new legislation, sponsored it,
that would change the definition of espionage
to not require defense-related information to be leaked,
but it could be just any kind of classified information,
which is a scary thought.
It's really lowering the bar on…
Are you talking about the Senate bill that was introduced
by Senator Benjamin Cardin, Democrat of Maryland?
I think that's the one, yes.
Well, that's legislation that was introduced about two weeks ago into the Senate.
It would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information.
It's called Senate Bill 355.
It would make it a felony for a government employee or contractor
who has authorized access to classified information
to disclose such information to an unauthorized person
in violation of his or her nondisclosure agreement.
Under existing law, criminal penalties apply only to the unauthorized disclosure
of a handful of specified categories of classified information.
That's in non-espionage cases.
Those categories include codes, cryptography, communications intelligence,
identities of covert agents, nuclear weapons design information.
But the new bill would amend the espionage statutes
to extend these penalties to the unauthorized disclosure
of any classified information.
And undoubtedly, this is a direct result of what happened last year with Wikileaks.
Sure, and one thing that's also disturbing about this is it doesn't matter
if this bill goes through and it's voted into law.
It won't even matter if the classified information that someone is alleged
for releasing was even properly classified in the first place.
There's all kinds of information that our government classifies
and makes secret for no good reason at all.
So if someone just releases some classified information
that shouldn't have been classified in the first place
but they think everybody should know about,
they could literally get the death penalty if this bill goes through.
So it's scary what's going on, and it's really a war.
It's a war about secrecy between the United States
and really its own citizens, as I see it.
Now also just going back to Manning and what he's actually facing,
as far as him being charged with espionage,
I would think if they try to argue that secret operations
or people taking part in those were revealed in this leak,
then it would count as espionage under their current definition, I think.
Okay.
Meanwhile, we have this other news story that came out at the end of last month.
President George W. Bush canceled a speaking engagement
because the group that invited him, the Young Presidents Organization,
had also asked Julian Assange to take the conference stage,
which is interesting because it took place in Denver,
and of course there's no way that Julian Assange could be in Denver to be part of that.
Well, I think he was going to appear by video link.
Yeah, I figured there was some kind of wizardry involved in that,
but not taking the stage.
He wouldn't be on the same stage as Bush.
That's the way it's being portrayed here.
The former president, according to Bush's spokesman,
has no desire to share a forum with a man who has willfully
and repeatedly done great harm to the interest of the United States.
Bush accepted an invitation to speak at the Global Leadership Summit in Denver,
which included discussions on topics ranging from education reform
to the latest unrest in the Middle East.
The former president only learned he would share a billing with Assange
a couple of days before the actual event took place.
We regret that our members will not be able to hear from President Bush.
The statement from the Young Presidents Organization said,
President Bush has spoken to our members several times in the past,
and we hope to have him participate in another event in the future.
Our only mission is to enable members to become better leaders
through education and idea exchange.
And I think that says a lot about the value of idea exchange
in someone like George W. Bush's mind,
that it's better not to talk to people you disagree with.
In fact, that's how foreign policy was led for the period he was in power.
And basically, Julian Assange had a tweet about this,
one of the famous Julian Assange tweets.
Thin skin, George W. Bush cancels talk at YPO.org
after organizers courageously refused to remove Assange as speaker.
Very interesting.
Of course, we also have Julian Assange who has lost his appeal.
Actually, it wasn't the appeal.
It was the actual hearing.
I believe he's appealing, and I'm not sure if he actually is.
But basically, he is due to be extradited to Sweden,
and that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
And also with relation to the new charges against Bradley Manning,
whether or not Julian Assange has something to worry about
as far as being brought back to the United States.
Well, it's interesting that the U.S. government has yet to find anything
to charge Assange with.
They're working on it.
They've been working for almost a year at this point,
and they've yet to find anything.
It's kind of heartening in a way.
It's terrible for Manning.
It's also interesting that President Bush can't share his debate
with Julian Assange.
He also can't go overseas to speak
because he's afraid of being arrested for war crimes.
I really doubt he's afraid of being arrested for war crimes.
That's why he cancels in Switzerland.
Yeah, I don't think that's why.
No, and that director, what's his name?
I think that's fantasy to believe that anybody in this government
thinks that anyone's going to be arrested anywhere for any war crimes.
I mean, I would love to see it,
but I just don't think they really think that's realistic.
We want to tell ourselves that that's great,
but I don't think they really believe it.
Henry Kissinger doesn't want flight or pain
because he's afraid of being arrested for war crimes.
He said that.
Henry Kissinger said he's afraid of being arrested
if he goes to a certain country.
There are good judges in Spain
that are willing to try people for war crimes.
I know, but I don't think he's afraid of that.
I don't think he believes that he's privy to the same laws.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I think it's really great news, actually,
that former President George W. Bush
refuses to take a stage with anyone
who has done anything against the interests of the United States
because he clearly harmed the United States' interests himself a great deal.
And so if he's not going to take the stage with himself,
then we'd never have to hear from him again.
I think it's great news.
Yeah, well, let's see if we can keep it that way.
We do now know how to make George W. Bush shut up.
Just invite Julian Assange to the same thing?
I think this is very valuable information.
Yeah, well, you've got to get the people that invite him to these things
to actually agree to invite somebody that he would object to.
We could just start a rumor.
Yeah, we're good at that. We really are.
Yeah, there's all kinds of things we could possibly do.
All right, well, we have other stories to cover as well,
and this is only one of many.
Of course, we'll be taking phone calls,
212-209-2900 a little bit later on.
Here's a story.
This bugged me.
This might be kind of controversial, I suppose.
It involves South Park.
That's why I say that.
A 21-year-old man who admitted posting online threats
against the creators of the animated TV series South Park
was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison.
Zachary Adam Chesser encouraged violent jihadists
to attack South Park writers for an episode
that depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.
He posted online messages that included the writers' home addresses
and urged online readers to pay them a visit.
His actions caused people throughout the country to fear speaking out,
even in jest, to avoid being labeled as enemies who deserve to be killed,
said U.S. attorney Neil McBride.
The fact that a young man from Northern Virginia
has committed such violence and terror
is a sobering reminder of the serious threat
that homegrown jihadists pose to this country.
He pleaded guilty in October to providing material support to terrorists,
communicating threats, and soliciting others to threaten violence.
The three charges carried a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
I accept full responsibility for all my actions.
I would like to take the opportunity to express remorse.
He is also accused of trying to go to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab,
which is an Islamic militant group the United States considers
a terrorist organization.
I've looked at this story.
I've read it.
I've tried to find out more about it.
All I can find is that this guy posted the addresses
of the two South Park writers
and encouraged people to visit them,
to pay them a visit and imply violence,
but not actually say anything specific,
not actually carry out violence himself.
25 years in prison for that?
I mean, I've seen people do worse on IRC
as far as posting people's home addresses
and threatening them with violence directly.
Is it just because this guy is Muslim?
What's the actual reason here?
It was Santa Claus.
Santa Claus?
It wasn't even Muhammad in the South Park episode.
It wasn't even Muhammad who was in the bear suit.
It was, when he finally took off the mask, it was Santa Claus.
See, I don't study this enough.
I don't know my South Park.
Mike?
I think it's pretty clear that this guy's religion
had a lot to do with the seriousness of the charges brought against him.
I think calling for people to be injured
for what they are on television is obviously wrong
and possibly even criminal, depending on exactly what he said.
But 25 years?
I've heard senators call for people to be hurt.
I've heard people threaten Julian Assange
with that to our elected officials.
And I say every time that I think it's wrong.
Uh-huh, yeah.
But I don't think they should be thrown in jail for 25 years.
The only thing that's unclear is if he has actual affiliation
rather than this vague allegations of the group in Somalia.
That may actually turn into something actually criminal.
But it's sort of buried behind.
But again, we've seen how happy the United States is
to classify anybody as a terrorist group that they don't like,
including the satellite network that some guy was put in jail
for providing to customers.
Redeye?
Did it say in the article that he provided material support to that group?
That was, uh...
Because, I mean, that sounds like either maybe he was sending them funds
or something like that.
There's another level to this.
Providing material support to terrorists.
Which he pled guilty to.
Ah!
Yeah, but what does that mean?
What does that actually mean?
It could be very, very vague.
We talked about this earlier, Emanuel, a few months ago.
About providing material support to terrorists?
When did we have that conversation?
We talked about it.
It was a news story because the, uh...
Oh, about a story, okay.
About the story about the U.S.'s definition of material support.
A federal court ruled, it might have been the Supreme Court,
I'm not sure, maybe Mike recalls.
It was such a vague definition of what material support meant.
It could simply be something like making a public statement,
saying, you know, don't do this because this would be not in your best interest.
That alone could be considered material support of a terrorist organization.
So it doesn't take much.
You don't have to give them money.
You don't have to give them goods, weapons, drugs, anything like that.
Material support can really be just speech.
Yeah, and it could also be like trying to convince them to support nonviolence,
which is why a lot of NGOs were against that ruling.
There's another case, too.
A student was jailed for five years in England on Friday
after being found guilty of posting extremist Islamic material,
including footage of attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan,
posting that on the Internet.
According to the Metropolitan Police Service's Counterterrorism Command,
Mohammad Gul, 23 years old, from East London,
posted movies he had created as well as existing extremist videos
on video sharing website YouTube over a period stretching from March 2008
to February 2009.
User accounts named Marine Target Corp, Marine Target Inc, 35 Marines,
things like that.
He uploaded video that included attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the making of and detonation of improvised explosive devices,
terrorist training camps, footage of the 9-11 attacks in New York,
and he then moved on to creating a compilation video of extremist material
relating to the situation in Gaza following the conflict with Israel in December 2008.
He was pouring petrol on the fire, they said.
His actions could have spurred others to commit acts of terror.
That's according to the jury at the Old Bailey in London.
Gul told the court he did not support terrorism,
but acted through curiosity and his political beliefs.
He was found guilty of five counts of dissemination of terrorist publications.
Again, I ask, what did this guy actually do?
He spread things around that were already out there.
He expressed his opinion.
It might not be an opinion that a lot of people agree with,
but it is an opinion nonetheless.
Did he do any violence himself?
Did he even advocate violence himself?
I don't see that here.
I have to say two things about this.
One, just, all right, well, basically, you know,
if someone is being charged or disciplined in some way for hate speech,
violent hate speech, you can maybe see that,
but being put in jail for over a decade is scary in itself
as far as freedom of speech goes,
and this is just really, you know,
it's like one step away from a thought crime, really.
Well, he only got five years, so I guess he got off lucky.
He got off lucky.
But they say this is one of the first successful prosecutions
relating to disseminating terrorist publications via the Internet
and shows our commitment to tackling those who support and encourage terrorism,
whatever means they use.
I've seen terrorism defined so broadly
that that kind of a thing could be used to apply to any enemy,
anybody who's considered a threat,
including, yes, hackers,
including people who blow whistles and release information.
This could be used against all kinds of people.
In this particular case, we're seeing it used against Muslims,
which is why you're not seeing much of an outcry.
And that statement should be taken to be, you know, very worrisome
because basically what they're saying is
we were testing the waters, it went very well,
and we hope to be back soon.
Absolutely.
All right.
We have another story of a totally different nature
involving domestic battling of threats, I guess,
and this is threats that people might face if they have kids
and they're worried about what their kids might be doing online.
Well, Mahwah police chief, James Batelli of New Jersey,
says teenagers are locking moms and dads out of their virtual rooms every day
and parents are none the wiser.
Trust sounds good, he says.
It's a good cliche.
But to stick your head in the sand
and think that in ninth, tenth, even eighth grade,
your child is not going to be exposed to alcohol,
is not going to be exposed to drugs.
It's kind of a naive way to go about it.
Now, he basically is suggesting that parents figure out ways
to hack into their kids' Facebook pages
by installing key logging software and all kinds of other spyware
and things like that.
He says it's entirely proper for parents to use these kinds of tools.
Keystroke loggers monitoring their kids
and basically looking for inappropriate words, inappropriate context,
things like that.
It's kind of interesting to see a police chief advocating this kind of thing.
What do you think, Bernie?
It's illegal.
What he's proposing to do is illegal.
Frankly, I think he should be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy
to commit wiretapping
because he is encouraging parents to wiretap their kids' computer communications
without their knowledge.
It doesn't matter if the victim is your child.
It's still felony wiretapping, both federally and in many states.
So I don't think this guy is going to get prosecuted,
but it's such hypocrisy when a police chief like that
or any law enforcement official advocates committing crimes.
In all seriousness, Bernie, do kids have the same rights,
kids under a parent's roof?
Can they charge their parents with wiretapping them
if they listen in on a phone call?
Is it really the same?
There's no exclusion in federal wiretapping law
or in state wiretapping law.
I haven't read every state's wiretapping law,
but in the states I'm familiar with,
Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, that sort of thing.
There's no exception for that.
Whether parents have been prosecuted for doing that so far, I don't know,
but there's no exemption or exception where the victim is your son or daughter
living in the same house with you.
Wow, so you're saying kids actually could prosecute their parents
for listening in on phone calls and reading letters.
They could, whether they're prosecutors.
Whether the DA's office or the U.S. Attorney's office
is going to take the case is a whole other matter,
but there's no exclusion or exemption in the law for that.
Maybe you'd be the spokesperson for any kid that wants to prosecute their parents
because, obviously, an 8-year-old calls up a prosecutor,
probably not going to take the kid very seriously,
but if you speak on their behalf, maybe we could...
I think they need a lawyer, not me, to speak on their behalf.
Yeah, I'm just wondering if any lawyer would actually do that. Mike?
I'm just curious about this claim that the children are being exposed to alcohol on the Internet.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure what his logic was there.
I think he was using that as an example.
There's alcohol on television if they're just concerned about seeing alcohol,
but actually obtaining it, I don't think you can do that.
I think the idea is more that if your kids are doing these things,
that they're going to be posting photos and stuff like that on the Internet
that they may not give you access to.
So the idea is that you're spying on communication that they assume to be private,
and then you may be able to reveal what they're really up to, I suppose, is the logic there.
I don't think it's a good logic.
Right, but there is logic all the same.
You know, the funny thing I think about this is, once upon a time,
kids used to go outdoors, and their parents just had to trust that they weren't getting into trouble
and hope that their parenting was actually good parenting.
Now with all this fear-mongering, you have these police officials saying,
well, you just watch your kids online because everything is so dangerous.
Watch everything they do.
And as we enter this more computerized world,
it's just a way of basically sucking away our rights, starting with the kids.
A friend of mine actually has a lot of experience with school bus drivers,
and I hear the stories all the time about how parents insist that their kids be in sight of them at a bus stop.
You can't have the kid walk around the corner to the bus stop.
They want to be able to watch them at all times until they get on that bus.
And then when they're on the bus, of course, there's a camera now that records the entire ride,
so that's all documented, and I'm sure as soon as they get into the school and pass the metal detectors,
there are more cameras, so every single minute of a kid's day can be documented by the parents.
That's not enough.
Now we've got to have Facebook and Twitter and all that monitored as well.
So going around the corner to wait for the bus isn't good anymore?
No, of course not, because you can't see the kid.
Who knows what might happen?
We have to be watching each other all the time.
It's scary. It really is.
And then there was this crazy headline I saw just before coming in.
This was actually on the front page of CNN.
I can't believe I'm going to even say this on the air.
Facebook like button takes over share button.
I didn't read any more than that, because I just was so blown away.
This is actually news. This is what people care about.
This is the front page of CNN.
Does anybody want to talk about what it means?
The Facebook like button has taken over the share button.
Is this a hostile takeover?
What exactly is going on here?
Buttons taking over other buttons.
All I just want to say is today I looked at the TV screen that was on CNN,
and I noticed that for a good portion of time they were talking about the iPad, too.
All I could think to myself is they don't have any real news anymore.
This is actually a legitimate segment now on their programming.
Charlie Sheen, the iPad.
These are things you mention in passing, and then move on to real news.
If Charlie Sheen had an iPad, that would be news.
Well, it would be broken, too.
I think that the difference you have now is that everything is instant and on all the time.
In the past, you had a news broadcast once a day, and it was actually the news.
Since it's been extended to a 24-hour thing and an always-on thing on the Internet,
you have to fill it with something in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
It's the sad reality, but it's not surprising that that happens.
But news was no better.
It had no more content when it was only on for a half hour a day or an hour a day.
It's just what the people feel is important and newsworthy, which is nonsense usually.
It's not what people think is important.
It's what's cheap enough for them to produce stuff they can produce cheaply.
That's why investigative journalism and good journalism actually does sell,
but it costs a lot of money to produce, so that's why they produce crap.
Unfortunately, crap sells as well.
Yeah, but no better than investigative journalism.
Oh, plenty better, plenty better.
It's unfortunate, but I think we share the responsibility here by even knowing who Charlie Sheen is and nonsense like that.
I just want to jump in and say that I personally think there's enough real news going on in the world
that we could fill most of 24-hour news with real content.
It's just like what you and Voltaire are saying.
Yeah, we just had Al Jazeera in here, actually, coming in to visit.
How is Al?
Sorry?
How is Al?
Al is just fine, Bernie.
But nobody in New York City can get them, except if they use the Internet to get them.
I know a lot of people can't do that for whatever reason.
As far as what's available to the masses, alternative news.
It's weird that's considered alternative news.
News from different perspectives other than the main TV channels here
and the news networks that are the same basic crap everywhere.
That is something that's considered out of bounds, something that people don't want.
And I think people would want it if they had more exposure to it,
but they need to speak up louder to make sure that they're actually listened to.
Okay, we have a couple of letters to read, and then I'd like to take some phone calls
because we haven't been able to do that in the last month or so.
Our phone number is 212-209-2900.
And if you want to comment on this book, I brought this book in,
but obviously we didn't have time to read it.
It's interesting because it's called Inside WikiLeaks,
my time with Julian Assange at the world's most dangerous website.
And it's interesting.
Supposedly the number two guy who defected from WikiLeaks and started OpenLeaks
has written this tell-all unauthorized biography or tale of WikiLeaks.
What's really funny is that the pictures were taken by who?
Who took these pictures?
Jacob Applebaum.
Someone else involved with WikiLeaks.
And I don't know where he fits in all the conflict,
but it's amazing how everybody knows each other and it's all the same group of people.
Well, Mr. Schmidt, as he was known at the time, spoke with Assange.
Wait, wait, wait.
Is his name Schmidt or Berg?
How do you change your name from Schmidt to Berg?
He had an alias, Daniel Schmidt, and his real name is now known to be Daniel Donscheit-Berg.
Okay.
I didn't know that.
That's confusing.
But Schmidt is shorter, so I keep saying it.
But he and Assange spoke together at at least one of the CCC conferences.
So there are pictures that hackers took of the two of them on stage
because they were on stage at the same time when hackers were around.
So what?
It's just a coincidence that it was Jacob Applebaum's picture that got used?
Well, I don't know who selected the pictures, but—
He does take good pictures.
He does take good pictures.
Yeah, that's true.
But he also was involved in WikiLeaks and gave the WikiLeaks keynote for Hope.
I took a picture of the two of them and it's not very good, so you shouldn't use it in a book.
I didn't see your picture in here.
No, it's not very good.
Voltaire.
Yeah, my opinion on the book is—
Other than the cat reference.
Yeah, no, but the cat reference is emblematic of the whole problem with the book.
I think what—I don't even want to pronounce his name—
is doing with OpenLeaks is a generally good project,
but I think that the book is indicative of a desire to take revenge on WikiLeaks,
which is very problematic.
This is the problem that I see, is that we have these organizations.
We have OpenLeaks, we have WikiLeaks, we have Cryptome,
and it seems like they spend most of their time just bickering at each other instead of uniting.
I think it's indicative of a lot of groups, actually,
that just they don't pay attention to what's going on in the world
and they focus on the people closest to them,
who oftentimes agree completely with what it is they're doing,
but they take all these potshots at each other and they weaken the entire cause as a result.
Now, you can point all kinds of fingers at different people and say,
well, it's because they act this way that I have to act that way.
You know, someone's got to take the upper road here
and someone's got to say, let's settle our arguments later.
Right now is when the war is being fought
and we have to basically unite or die, really.
We need a director, Emanuel.
A director? I don't know about that.
The United States has a director of national intelligence
to sort of oversee all the intelligence agencies,
so we need a director of international leaking, a DIL.
Okay.
You want that job?
Well, if you don't want to represent the 80-year-olds,
I'm going to suggest you go for that job then, all right?
You're getting a job out of this show one way or another, Bernie.
Unfortunately, you know, all these catty dramas and stuff like that don't end with high school.
People continue it into real life.
I've noticed that.
Unfortunately, it can backlash.
Yeah.
It goes straight into senility and not even a small break.
It's incredible.
Kyle?
It is worth saying, though, it's a tremendous waste of time.
Here they are.
They've got this new platform and this new form of journalism
that can reach the entire world all at once sort of on an equal ground
and they're wasting time, you know, stirring up drama
and, you know, basically attacking each other
and basically it weakens the organization.
I think that's just what oppressive governments
and other folks who are against this sort of movement,
that's just what they want.
Which is why they were crazy for that cat story
because it was a great example of something they could use to insult Julian Assange
and take people's eyes off the actual issue.
Okay.
So, let's see.
We have some email here, oth at 2600.com.
Actually, I've been reminded that we actually have Al Jazeera on the radio station.
That wasn't what I was referring to.
I was referring to having Al Jazeera on TV,
which we're not allowed to have in this country, apparently,
except in a couple of places.
But, yes, if you listen to WBAI between 5 and 6 in the morning,
you can hear the audio from Al Jazeera for one hour, one precious hour a day.
But that's it.
5 AM is a little bit late.
Or early, depending on how you look at it.
Early.
That's the only way you can get it in New York City,
on anything that's free, over the air, or even cable, or even satellite.
Now, I personally think, you know, whether Mike likes that time set or not,
that's still a major step.
It is.
You know, you have New York, you know, that's a very big audience.
A lot of people are commuting at that time,
and now they can listen to what is considered alternative media.
All right.
Let's listen to some reader mail.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
And we'll be taking phone calls in just a moment.
212-209-2900.
This letter is from Mr. White.
Dear Off The Hook, I live in the UK.
I've been listening to your show for some time now,
after accidentally stumbling on a wiki entry for Off The Hook,
whilst searching for a UK TV show of the same name.
I didn't know there was a UK TV show of the same name.
Wow.
I'm glad I found you guys.
I'd completely forgotten about the TV show until now,
as you've expanded my horizons by introducing me to such wonders as 2600,
Hope, and many more.
In particular, I've been following your coverage of the WikiLeaks saga with some interest.
Firstly, I should say that I'm fully supportive of what WikiLeaks claims to be
a functional whistleblower platform,
a mechanism by which individuals can disclose serious breaches of international law
committed by governments,
a collateral murder being a perfect example,
the video that was released last year.
No country should be allowed to break international law and simply cover it up.
In this context, WikiLeaks is a service provider,
and a very much needed one.
However, WikiLeaks seems to have gone a step further
and simply wants to publish all classified information,
irrespective of what that information says,
and for me, that is a step too far.
If WikiLeaks were to do this for information from all countries,
and essentially level the playing field,
then I could consider that to be responsible journalism,
but to do this with predominantly US information
is simply an attempt to stick it to the man,
and to quote Jacob Applebaum,
well, that's just stupid.
I'm not sure if he was saying it in relation to that.
I hope I've not taken his statement out of context,
as that is broadly what he meant in his keynote address at Hope.
To be so one-sided is potentially dangerous to the US,
as it gives enemies information that they couldn't have otherwise obtained for free,
and may risk the lives of US servicemen and women when operating overseas.
I'd like to see WikiLeaks go back to its roots
and remain an unbiased whistleblowing platform
that is respected and trusted by the majority.
I would really like to hear your views on these comments
as they go against some of the statements that have been made on the show.
Thanks, Mr. White, for writing in on that.
I believe WikiLeaks has redacted quite a bit of information
that has been released in recent months,
and as for a lot of it coming from the United States,
it's where the leaks come from.
If the leaks come from a different country,
I don't see evidence that they're not being pursued.
Material from the US is created generally in English,
which is very convenient for English speakers to leak and analyze.
I would just say, generally, that while WikiLeaks is far from perfect,
they're doing a much better job of this sort of thing than anyone else is right now,
and it would be foolish to pretend that I could do it better.
It's simply not true that they're only publishing American documents lately.
They publish tons just because in the Anglophone world,
the American documents get more attention,
but they've published a lot of things from other countries even recently.
They just leaked something about a parade in Germany
where there was rioting because it was overcrowded,
but that didn't get any American media attention.
Rioting because of what?
Because it was overcrowded.
Okay.
The love parade, yeah.
Yeah, that one.
Okay.
It wasn't that much of a scandal, but…
Oh, it was.
It was quite the scandal in Germany.
It was a big problem.
Rioting because of overcrowding.
Well, there weren't sufficient emergency exits,
so the plan maybe should have never been approved in the first place and so on.
Okay, Kyle.
I agree with what you're saying, Voltaire,
about how they're able to leak anything really from all different kinds of countries,
and the language helps too for Anglophones to read English.
But WikiLeaks doesn't just leak things exclusively from the U.S.
It just seems to be what they have now and what has been pertinent
and sort of as a follow-up to the collateral murder video,
which was a big deal when it was released.
And it's the way WikiLeaks is set up.
They're set up as a journalistic entity, and they can make the editorial decisions.
They can decide when things are released and to whom they release those things.
And it's interesting.
That's what Daniel Schmidt, I guess we're calling him,
that's the way his new leaking organization wants to differentiate itself.
They're trying to make it such that the leaker also then has control over
where and how that leak is then disseminated as a leak
once it's been sort of processed by his new open leaking organization.
Has OpenLeaks leaked anything yet?
It's going to be in beta mode right now, and then they're going to launch.
I think they're actually going to launch at the CCC camp this summer.
And if you go, you can help volunteer with them, which I encourage.
I encourage anybody out there who has a really juicy leak
to leak it to all these organizations at once and see who does the best job with it
and just sort of do a consumer report type of shopping comparison
with the various leaking sites out there.
And maybe there are other leaking sites out there too that we can compare as well.
Okay, here's another letter.
First of all, I'd like to say this is from Eric.
I'd like to say I love your show.
There needs to be many more like it across the country, across the world.
Thank you for telling the truth and not propagating government lies.
Well, it's tempting sometimes, but we try to shy away from that.
I catch your program via podcast and found it rather by accident.
I also buy your mag on a newsstand, and as soon as I get some funds together,
I'm going to do that subscription thing.
I would have never known about all the stuff that's going on in the world
if it wasn't for your show.
I don't own a television, and I keep Big Brother's opinions out of my house,
as well as the newspaper.
He relies on the newspaper.
He doesn't keep it out of his house.
The first I heard about the Libya and Yemen revolutions I heard on your show.
I love that you guys cover this as I consider these people life hackers,
creating their own destiny by hacking their system.
You guys are talking about Al Jazeera on cable TV,
but you can also go to the web and watch live streaming video of the news station.
No, I'm not a terrorist nor Muslim.
I watch because I like my news untainted,
and international news is as close as I can get to that.
By the way, there was a story on Al Jazeera about Julian Assange as well.
I just thought I'd throw that in there.
I love arguing with my radio.
I'm one of those people that doesn't always agree with you,
but then I'm comfortable playing devil's advocate.
I love hearing a whole lot of truth and a little bit of time.
Thanks again, Eric, for that nice letter there.
You can write to us too, oth at 2600.com.
Maybe your letter will be read on the air as well.
You can send us a letter in the mail too,
WBAI, off the hook, WBAI, 120 Wall Street, 10th floor, New York, New York, 1005.
You know, people don't do that nearly enough,
and I can't remember the last time we actually got a letter like that.
The post office needs the work, so by all means, send us a real letter.
That would be nice too.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900 is here from our listeners,
who we have not heard from live on the air in quite some time,
and you're the first one.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Good evening.
I just wonder why you guys aren't doing more research and expose
of the company called Naris, N-A-R-I-S, out of California,
which is doing the deep packet inspection.
Okay, well, I'm just checking to make sure they haven't paid us off.
I don't think they're on the list.
No, I don't think they are on the list.
They are singularly responsible for the Egypt deep packet inspection fiasco,
which was able to deny many users, you know, both Twitter and the Internet,
and that company is now owned by Boeing Corporation,
and Boeing bought them.
It was founded by two Israeli military intelligence guys,
and additionally the companies like Converse, that's C-O-M-V-E-R-S-E,
and the company Nice, N-I-C-E,
and several of their offshoots have been guilty of all sorts of different
Internet denial of what I'll call public access, not service, but public access.
Most of these companies are Israeli,
and it's really interesting that Israel trumpets itself as the democracy
of the Middle East and yet produces software that generally denies people
access to things that we would consider very much in the democratic mode,
and I'll hang up and take my answer off the air.
I haven't heard of that company, but I'm fairly certain in the case of Egypt,
the way that they cut off the Internet was the government called the ISPs or,
I don't know, sent them mail or something,
and said basically unplug yourself from the Internet.
So I don't know that there was any deep packet inspection going on in that case
to get between them, but maybe somebody else knows more about this.
Well, when Egypt went offline, it went offline,
but when most of these countries are online,
their Internets are still filtered and censored and monitored,
and the caller is right that a lot of the technology that's used to do this
filtering, monitoring, and censoring is built by countries in allegedly democratic lands.
The Chinese government, for instance,
is a huge purchaser of Cisco products that they use to do the filtering,
and I don't have a list of every country's preferred censorware vendor,
but it's definitely the case that a lot of this stuff does come from the U.S.
Okay. 212-209-2900 is our phone number.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Oh, dear. That's what happens if you don't stay on the line.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Did his voice change? I think it did.
It's one way, though. He's modified his suggestion to us.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Hello?
Hi. What's on your mind?
Hi. I was just—I wanted to know if you guys heard about this story.
Actually, I saw it online today about some designer
who had said something anti-semantic, I believe, in France,
and I believe he might be going to prison for it. I don't know if you—
I don't think he's going to prison for being anti-Semitic, but he got fired.
I'm not sure how this relates in any way to anything we're talking about,
but I've heard the story.
Oh, because you guys started off the program—
I think you had mentioned somebody at the beginning of the program.
You had mentioned somebody about—oh, the guy who incited violence against the creators of South Park.
Right, the guy—OK, someone who gave out their addresses and things like that.
Yeah, I think it's a slightly different thing, somebody saying something anti-Semitic
and having to face the consequences from their employer as a result of that,
as opposed to somebody being sent to prison for giving out someone's home address
and suggesting people pay them a visit and having that interpreted as advocating violence.
I just think there's more to that story.
Maybe we haven't heard the whole range of things that he was doing,
but it just seemed very heavy on penalties for what he actually was accused of doing.
But thanks for that call. Let's take another one. 212-209-2900.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
No? OK. How about you? You're on off the hook. Good evening.
Speak up.
Speak up.
Oh, hi. Sorry about that. Good evening.
Basically, you guys were talking earlier about the law enforcement official encouraging parents to,
you know, eavesdrop on their kids' computers and stuff like that.
Break into their Facebook accounts.
Yeah, stuff like that.
I would suspect that the legal precedents—not that I'm advocating parents do this, of course—
but it's along the lines of employers and use of employer computers.
And basically employers have pretty free reign over their monitoring of employees.
Well, employers generally can read e-mails that are sent to the company e-mail address,
but I don't think employers are allowed to put key loggers and break into their Facebook accounts.
Am I wrong?
If you're visiting stuff on your employer's computer, the employer has the right to watch you.
They can see what you're doing, but can they grab your passwords and log in?
If you transmit them over the employer's network in clear text, then yes.
Wow. OK.
Well, but they're not then allowed to go and log into the person's Facebook account,
but they can monitor what you're doing on Facebook.
Right.
And so, you know, I suspect parents have the same kind of thing, you know, rights.
I would guess, but, you know.
What do you think about that, Bernie?
I think it's interesting.
OK.
You know, but, you know, I mean, I've, you know, I'm a parent,
but my kids are too young to deal with this yet, but, you know,
eventually we'll have to do something, I guess, but I'm not exactly sure what.
I just think we live in a society where there's no trust anymore.
That might sound naive, but if you have to spy on your kids to find out what they're up to
and read their mail and give them drug tests and things like that,
it just seems to me like it's kind of unhealthy.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, you have to have some sort of trust involved
and, you know, you need to see what your kids are doing
and, you know, you check who your friends, you know, in the real world,
you know who your kids' friends are and, you know, get to understand who they are.
And I imagine you have to do the same thing virtually to some degree or another also.
Well, you know who your kids' friends are because you meet them and you get to know them.
You don't do a background check before they even enter the house the first time.
It's a big difference.
Yes, it's true.
Parents, you know, should take an active interest in what their kids are doing
and try to pay close attention.
That's their job.
And I don't think anyone here is saying that they shouldn't do that.
You know, but there's a certain way to go about it.
There's, you know, being some, like giving your kids drug tests and watching their every move.
Or there's parents taking more active interest in understanding technology,
like, for instance, creating Facebook accounts and friending their kids
and making sure that, you know, maybe they're not hiding too much or something like that.
Friending their kids, wow.
I think, though, we're being a little short-sighted here.
I mean, I don't think that you should be, you know, intensively spying on your children.
But, you know, the Internet and computers in general are a vast form of communication
that didn't exist maybe when we were kids.
And so there's a lot more that can go on in there.
You know, it's not just necessarily these days knowing who your kids' friends are
because they have this whole other form of communication that doesn't involve them
physically meeting people or talking to them on the phone, et cetera.
So, I mean, I don't support what this police officer necessarily says,
but I think that there are, you know, times are changing.
Well, yeah, times are changing and the tools are changing,
but I don't think the mentality should change.
I think we should still, you know, back in the days before there was Internet,
there were telephones.
You could still go to the mall and hang out with unsavory types there.
And there was more of a dialogue with kids.
You wouldn't be hiring privatized to follow them and spy on them and things like that
because that's an element of mistrust.
And I think we can have the same dialogue with new technology
and actually have conversations with our kids and they won't fall into these traps.
So maybe it's a matter not so much of monitoring
but of just being aware that these new technologies exist
and, you know, having conversations about it and saying, you know,
I want you to know that maybe these are some things that you should be aware of
that exist on the Internet that maybe you're not that are unsafe or whatever.
Yeah, and parents should be able to just kind of, you know,
have the conversation and ask their kids,
what are you doing on the computer?
They should take an interest.
I mean, if their children are so interested in computers and technology,
I think it doesn't take much for a parent to step in and ask, you know,
hey, what are you doing? What's going on?
Not be seen as the enemy, not be seen as a spy,
somebody you can actually talk to and trust because you need that.
You need that growing up.
You need that in a family setting.
You know, that is such a good point though.
If you don't raise your kids to trust them,
to be able to make certain decisions where you're trying to train them,
then you're going to end up with a generation of people that need to be watched
because none of them can be trusted.
And they're going to feel like that's what they're supposed to have happen to them.
If you treat people like they're prisoners, they're going to act like they're prisoners.
And this is one of my points about schools today
where you actually go through a metal detector when you go in.
People think, kids think that's normal.
It's not normal.
There's something sick about a society.
We have to go through a metal detector to go into school.
And we better address that issue and not simply accept it.
And it affects people for the rest of their lives.
Anyway, we're really going off on tangents and soapboxes here.
Let's take a couple more phone calls.
212-209-2900.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Yeah.
You got to move faster. I'm sorry.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Hey, great. How are you guys?
Hi.
Yeah, take it off speaker.
There's three comments I want to make.
The first one, I'll be very quick and brief, is the HOPE conference.
Is there any hope that HOPE will be because of the Penn State, whatever, Penn Hotel?
We hope so. We do.
Is there any word on that?
It's set for 2012.
So there is going to be one more HOPE conference?
Or are they going to shut it down?
Well, we hope there will be many more.
We just don't know exactly what the status of the hotel is right now.
But if it's around in 2012, there will be one there.
If it's around in 2014, there will be one there as well.
Okay. I mean, this is March.
So, I mean, is there a deadline where you guys would know?
The HOPE conference was in June.
Well, yeah, but there's also another year to go because this is 2011,
and the next one won't be until 2012.
Oh, it's every two years.
Well, why don't you guys have one this year then in case –
Because it's a biannual conference.
It can't be a biannual conference if you have it every year.
That's true, but under the circumstances –
We'd be breaking the law if we did that, wouldn't we?
Yeah.
No, that's just how we do it.
We don't do it every year because it turns into a job then.
It turns into something that, you know,
you just wind up putting a number at the end of it.
It'll be HOPE 14 or something like that.
It gets boring.
It gets to be not as much of an event.
It's the same reason we don't have 2,600 meetings every week.
We only have them once a month.
And also, we like to go to other conferences too.
We like to go to the Chaos Camp, which is taking place this summer.
If we were doing a conference this summer, we'd be all crazy,
and we wouldn't be able to go overseas and have fun there.
And you should consider doing that too.
Where is the Chaos Conference? Is it in the New York area?
No, that's in Germany.
Oh, okay.
That's why it takes time.
Okay, fine.
Two other comments.
The first thing is, you guys seem like you're very intelligent,
but a guy –
We seem that way, yes.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, though, you have a little naivety
when you say this guy shouldn't have been put away
for publishing a guy's address online and to pay him a visit.
25 years?
25 years?
Okay, that might be.
But you're inciting someone to possibly go and kill that person
or firebomb that person's house.
I've had people do worse to me, and nothing happened to them.
Not that I was hoping they would go to jail for even a day,
but it's ridiculous.
There are people in Wall Street that should be in jail for the rest of their life.
I agree with you there's inadequacy in the law,
but that's an interesting debate.
There's no question about that.
Who are the real criminals, and what is the proper punishment?
You've got to admit, there are a lot of sick people.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
But there are ways of finding them before they do horrible things,
and I don't think this is one of the ways.
We're out of time, but thanks for your call.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Remember, there are meetings this Friday coming up,
2600 meetings all over the world.
Go to www.2600.com slash meetings.
And again, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll see you again next week.
Yes, have a good night.