This meeting is a second in a series of dialogues to turn around WBAI from the dire possibilities of collapse.
We are looking for ideas and solutions, not diatribe.
Please bring your photo ID for access to the building.
All are welcome.
This is Phil Donahue.
And you're listening to WBAI New York 99.5.
And it is just about 7 o'clock p.m.
You are listening to WBAI 99.5 FM New York.
And it is time for another exciting episode of Off the Hook.
Let's go.
And a very good evening to you.
The program is Off the Hook.
Rob T. Firefly here with you.
I am joined in the studio by Mike.
Good evening.
And on the telephone by Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And not by Emanuel Goldstein, who is apparently paddling his car uptown from, or downtown from parts unknown,
because we're having flash floods and things like that.
I've received a text message.
A text message?
A text message that says he will be here in five minutes if you want to believe anything you ever see by text message.
I don't know if I trust text messages.
But okay, according to the clock on the wall, it is 7.02 and 22 seconds.
So if we add five minutes to that, I think we can, we'll test the veracity of this text format of which you speak.
Well, it also depends on when I received the text message, which was, you know.
Well, I received the text message just now.
All right.
And you related it to me verbally.
That's fair.
But all kinds of things are going on elsewhere in the world.
Did you see this story from Copenhagen?
Copenhagen.
Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, has decided that they have all these CCTV cameras all over the place,
which is not particularly unusual for large cities.
But they've decided they have enough of them.
They aren't doing anything to stop crime, and they're going to not put up any more.
I don't know what this guy's title, ch.supt.
Anyway, that's his title.
His name is Sven Foldegar.
And he says it's extremely costly to get both the data in and to archive it, so we have to weigh up the benefits.
It does not have any preventative effect.
We can use it to investigate some things, and that's good.
But CCTV doesn't really make a difference.
This is sounding an awful lot like sanity and a reasonable assessment of events.
What's this guy doing in power?
I don't know.
And then there's also this guy, Peter Larson, who is the head of the Forum for Surveillance Studies at Aarhus University,
which sounds kind of creepy, but he agrees.
He says that CCTV is often put in place to have a preventative effect,
but research shows that CCTV has only a minimal effect on serious crime,
and that much of the violence that takes place is not premeditated or that takes place under the influence,
and here perpetrators don't think rationally about the consequences of video monitoring.
Wait, surveillance studies is a subject at a university.
He is the head of the Forum for Surveillance Studies.
So for those of you still looking for a major.
I mean, I would assume that's where the surveillance people studied,
but apparently he says, yeah, you don't need it so much.
Well, I think there's a lot to be said for a bit of a reasonable voice in the surveillance studies field.
What do you think, Bernie?
You could get a whole doctorate in that.
There's so much surveillance going on.
There's no shortage of knowledge to be had in that field.
Here in Philadelphia, back in June, they discovered that they're spending like tens of millions of dollars on CCTV,
and somebody discovered back in June that only about half the cameras are working,
but they're still spending over $100,000 a year for each camera, even though they're not working.
So people are asking questions about that.
The city solicitor, who's actually the main lawyer for the city, is saying this is not good.
So I guess he's overstating the obvious.
But yeah, all this video surveillance, it's Orwellian, and it doesn't really stop.
It doesn't stop crime.
It doesn't have any preventive effect.
Who looks at the camera and says, oh, I better not have that fight that I was going to just punch this guy in the face or whatever?
It just doesn't work that way.
This all ties in interestingly with another story that's been going around the past week about something called Trapwire,
which apparently is a spy network that uses surveillance cameras all over the place,
collates the data from them, and possibly uses facial recognition to identify who is where and doing what.
What country is this in?
This is in that country called the United States of America.
So I thought the United States of America had laws on reasonable expectations of privacy and whatnot.
That's just crazy talk because these people apparently have gotten a lot of money from our very government
who are supposedly in charge of those laws to do this.
And basically they've been leaked by WikiLeaks,
who published a great deal of private emails that apparently spell out a great deal of information about this plan.
And there are all sorts of reactions going on to it.
And let's see here.
Documents from the U.S.
Where is it operating?
It's operating, let's see, it is operating in a couple of major cities so far.
Maybe they won't tell us.
Maybe they won't tell us.
From what I've read about it, you've got to read between the lines in some of these stories.
But it appears that it's taking information from a lot of sources through video
and that one of the sources of information is optical character recognition of license plates on vehicles.
And ostensibly this was originally just to make sure people weren't evading tolls.
But as more and more of these automatic license plate reading cameras appear for people who travel in motor vehicles,
we know that the law enforcement agencies aren't just discarding this data right away.
They're logging this.
They're archiving it for who knows how long.
And once you start having a huge database of what vehicles are located where and when and how often
and in proximity to what other motor vehicles license plates,
you can start data mining that for all kinds of information that many people would consider a violation of their privacy,
like who they associate with, who they're traveling in caravans with, where they go, how often.
And I think it's spooky.
It's very spooky.
And, of course, this was published by WikiLeaks, who have been having some issues of their own lately.
Earlier this, I think it was yesterday, actually, that it was reported by The Guardian in the UK
that Ecuador had approved Julian Assange's call for asylum.
That was then denied by the Ecuadorian government earlier today, who said they're still reviewing.
They've promised to hold a news conference tomorrow at 7 a.m. Ecuador time explaining what will happen next.
Yeah, so they're still reviewing the situation, and we thought we had news on it, and now we don't.
I have a theory about this.
What's your theory?
I have a theory that this is one possible scenario, is that someone in Ecuador leaked this, that it really was going to happen.
That was the plan.
And then when the story came out, a large government such as the United States,
which has a pending trade agreement up for renewal with the nation of Ecuador and the UK
and a lot of other countries that do a lot of trade with Ecuador, probably heard this and decided to send some not-so-happy messages to them,
saying, hey, you want to play ball with us? You better change your mind on this.
So maybe that's what's going on. I don't know, but it seems possible.
So what you're saying is you're making this up?
I said I have a theory. Theories are things that are generally made up.
All right. Well, I guess tomorrow morning we'll find out what happens next.
We won't know what happens next, but we might not know the back story behind what's really happening.
But it seems like that's a plausible scenario.
It looks like – I don't think Julio Sáenz would have done this.
Apparently he had contacts with the Ecuadorian government at high levels
before he jumped into the Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom, or in London, to seek refuge.
And so I don't think he would have done that if he thought there was no chance in hell of him getting political asylum.
Maybe he was sort of given a sort of wink and a nod, like, yeah, OK, we'll do this.
But now maybe he may or may not be working out that way.
I'm coming in midway, and I apologize for this, but we're talking about Julian.
We're talking about Julian, I take it.
Yes.
What I've heard is that it seems likely he's going to get asylum.
Is that not what you believe?
Well, the story came out a couple of days ago that he was going to get it,
and then someone from the Ecuadorian government said today that, no, there's been no such decision made yet.
And Mike's saying now that tomorrow morning, tomorrow there's going to be a press conference
where there'll be more information available.
We were just speculating about what's really going on behind the scenes.
Well, that's the last thing I heard, too, was that there's going to be an announcement tomorrow.
But it's interesting just seeing how the mainstream media is covering the story
because they seem to be saying that it looks like he's going to get asylum.
I don't know what they're basing this on.
But one thing, when I looked at the Al Jazeera story, if you read this story,
which has a big picture of Assange and, I believe, the Ecuadorian president on the front of it,
they say that the country or the president of the country there has been at odds with Washington in the past.
Now, this whole story has nothing to do with Washington, supposedly,
but it's interesting how that is being focused on more than anything else.
And I have to wonder, you know, and maybe we could do an experiment
where people who violate—what's it called over there?
Is it—it's not probation, it's bail.
What do they call it in England?
It was bail, I believe.
Is it bail? They use the same word?
How interesting.
Yeah, they speak English there most of the time.
How about that.
Well, okay, so let's get a bunch of people who violate their bail to go to the embassy of their choice
and see if those buildings get surrounded by police as well.
I don't think they will.
It's just very interesting how much attention the story is getting.
So you have to wonder if maybe there's a little bit more to it in the mainstream than what we're being led to believe.
I mean, most people, if they go to an embassy, will just be, you know, summarily thrown out of the embassy.
That happens to me, yeah.
I know.
Yeah.
Well, okay, speaking of going interesting places, Mike, you're back from someplace interesting.
You can see on my wrist.
Oh, Microsoft?
I wasn't going to say it on the air, but yeah.
I'll say it on the air.
Why do you have a Microsoft?
Well, because the other thing says where I went, which I guess we can—we said last week,
but we can reveal in 10 seconds.
But apparently Microsoft gave them enough money to make it say Microsoft on my wrist right now.
My goodness, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
I'm learning as I go along.
Yeah.
Mike, you were at TorCamp, which is the second hacker camp in America.
The second TorCamp, yeah.
Well, as far as I know, are there other hacker camps in America that we don't know about?
No, but you make it sound like someone else did it, but TorCamp has done it twice.
If you had let me finish the sentence, I would have said their first one was in 2009 in western Washington,
and this was in eastern Washington.
Other way around.
Yes, that's what I meant.
Yeah.
Yes, thank you.
This one was in western Washington, which is a lot less dry and also on the ocean.
And last week we talked to both you and Kyle out there.
You were on your way to the event.
You're back.
Kyle is still over there, though, because he lives out in Seattle.
Kyle, are you with us?
Yes, I'm here.
Okay.
Yeah, he's there.
He's been on the phone actually the whole time since last week.
We forgot to hang up.
Oh, well.
It's going to be wonderful.
You know, if you had forgotten to hang up, then the call would have dropped at the camp.
There was not a whole lot of mobile phone service there.
Okay.
Give us, because we don't really have that very much time.
And, again, I do apologize for being late.
Two things have to happen.
Number one, it has to stop having these biblical weather conditions on Wednesdays, and two,
our infrastructure must improve where things don't get totally flooded every time it rains
or almost every time it rains.
But, again, I will try and leave maybe four hours early next time just so I can definitely be here on time.
So, now, tell us your quick impressions of what tour camp was like.
And comparing it maybe to a European hacker camp.
It was smaller.
It was about 500 people, which I think was actually a really nice size.
I got to talk to a lot of the people.
It was a lot harder to get to than anywhere in Europe.
You couldn't just hop on the high-speed rail.
No, you could not hop on the high-speed.
You could not.
No.
No.
And there were a lot of interesting people there.
There were a lot of interesting talks.
One thing they did was that the first day of the camp, which was last Thursday, all the talks were 20 minutes long,
so you got to see a lot of people talking about interesting things and then moving on to something else interesting.
There was people hacking, soldering.
There was welding going on.
There was a giant blue laser that I'm sure Kyle will tell us about.
There was the Church of Robotron.
Robotron is a game, a computer game, and they turned it into a church with candles and weird, ominous messages going out.
And there was the ocean, too.
There's always the ocean.
Now, Kyle, Mike mentioned the laser, and I know you were one of the key people in that particular project.
What exactly are we talking about here?
Yeah, well, it's something that I helped with.
It wasn't the key view.
Definitely in producing it for the event, I helped out a lot as far as moving stuff around and setting stuff up.
I believe you also were watching out for airplanes, and if that's not key, I don't know what is.
Yeah, I was a spotter for a little while.
I basically just kept an eye out for things in the air and looked at the laser quite a bit.
It was a bit misty, but we had some good weather, almost a clear night at once, or at least some high clouds.
And, yeah, basically a group of people at HBL started this idea of using an array of one-watt diodes to make a spectacle.
And Tour Camp basically gave us an art grant so we could create this spectacle.
And it turned out really, really well.
There were a couple individuals involved that really came through in coming up with cooling systems and a lot of software and stuff.
Different projects, like different sorts of safety interlocks and microcontrollers were used.
Well, just to describe the spectacle just a little bit, what I saw, the pictures I saw, a brilliant blue beam of light pointed straight up into the heavens.
And I think because it was cloudy, kind of exploding in the sky and basically bathing the entire area in blue light. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, that's actually a great way of describing it. That's exactly what it was.
There was a yurt.
Yeah, it was on top of a yurt.
Yeah, well, that makes perfect sense.
Largely, Three Ricks and some of the other people at HBL, Ratha, she built these yurts from her own design.
A yurt being a Mongolian tent or something equivalent that is used over there.
They're very big and very comfortable. Well, they can be anyway.
Yeah, I didn't know where they were struck with the idea, but I think this is something that they had in hand and it worked out really, really well.
I've never built a yurt before and I assembled a couple of them.
Well, you do well in Mongolia then because they're constantly on the move with those things.
It's a nomadic society in many parts and they literally move from one part of the country to the other with their yurts and they rebuild them in the places that they go.
So you had a little taste of that. They don't point lasers up in the sky.
Maybe that's a tradition you can get started over there as well.
But you were on a Native American area of land and I understand that they were rather impressed by the blue laser, which suddenly was showing up everywhere.
Like local fire and EMT from the tribal emergency services organizations that are part of the tribe and the reservation there.
And they were kind of mingling around and keeping an eye on things during the event.
And we had built up a rapport and wanted them to know what was going on and they were very, very interested in what we were putting together and watching it and had a really good time.
So I also talked to some people that were helping with vending, like local people that had come in to sell different kinds of snacks, I think, basically.
I didn't really go over there. I brought in a little bit of my own food.
But yeah, they really thought it was a cool installation among the many other projects that were there at tour camp.
And HVL did a really good job.
And they're looking for a little bit of help donation-wise.
So you can check out the final blog post, I think, is up at hackerbotlabs.com.
Okay, great.
Yeah, the local people were really kind and enjoyed it.
They had a lot of good things to say.
I'm sorry I missed this one, but hopefully there'll be another tour camp at some point out there because it seems like some kind of tradition is being started.
They've promised to do one in two years.
In two years?
In two years.
Why in two years? It's right after Hope.
Because they don't want to conflict with the European camp.
Yeah, but you know how hard it is to...
There's only so many years in a series of years.
Well, we should figure something out. Maybe in the middle of winter or something. How about that?
I'm not going camping in the middle of winter.
Okay, I'll go.
All right, have fun.
All right, any final words on tour camp? And hopefully we'll be reporting other hacker events in the near future.
Everyone should have gone. That's my advice.
It would have been overcrowded if everybody went.
You should have gone if you're listening to this and you didn't go.
Kyle, any final words from you?
I had a really good time. I loved the location. I wonder what they'll come up with next, if they'll use a similar spot.
It's a beautiful area out there, the lowlands and the beach forest, and that interface is really spooky. It was very magical.
There's a lot of mist and condensation in the air, so the battle yurt made everything glow and illuminated everything.
But the beach had all sorts of its own magic, like bioluminescent creatures and all that kind of fun stuff.
I just liked being out in nature. It was really a terrific event, real intimate and exciting.
People should check these things out. It's a fun way to get together with other hackers.
Cool. Hopefully there'll be more such events and people will be inspired to hold their own in the countries that they're listening from as well.
There are so many more than there were just a few years ago.
Is that true, Kyle, about Microsoft bracelets, though? They were giving those out?
Yeah. The bracelets are like the silicone rubber band style bracelet.
I guess it's black and they had it embossed with white ink. On one side it says Tour Camp, on the other side it says Microsoft.
I guess they got sponsorship money in various ways, which they were pretty open about from the get-go on their website.
I'm seeing, Mike, you're wearing a Microsoft logo. In order to get him to do that, it's amazing that they pulled that off.
On the inside of the band, by the way, it says 1 G Y L S F M F U E H L T H D E.
I'm not going to try to pronounce that.
There was a crypto challenge that I don't know if anyone solved, but there were clues all over the event.
That was one of them that I just said. I'm not going to repeat it.
No, don't do that. Anything else, Kyle?
Oh, no. I'll catch up with you guys again later. I'm still unpacking and sort of reassessing what's next.
I'm sure it'll be exciting, whatever that is. Thanks for joining us.
Next, I assume this person in the studio I don't recognize is our guest for today. Is that correct?
So I've been told.
This is Aaron Schwartz, who's giving a talk tomorrow called How We Stopped SOPA.
Is that true, Aaron? That is, in fact, your name.
It is true. And that is my name.
Good. OK. I'm glad I guessed that right.
So now this talk is taking place. I just see an address here.
What's the name of the place it's taking place at? It's at 99 Madison Avenue. Is that correct?
Yep. And people can go to illegalinstruction.com to RSVP.
OK. How did we stop SOPA? And have we, in fact, stopped SOPA? And what was your role in stopping SOPA?
Well, you should go tomorrow and find out is the real answer. But it's a fascinating story.
It's one of the few examples, not just in hacker culture, but in political culture generally,
of people coming together on the Internet and actually stopping a major bipartisan initiative.
Actually, it'd probably be best if, for our listeners, we explain what SOPA was,
because some people might not know what we're talking about. Anybody want to take that on?
I think Aaron's qualified. OK. Go ahead.
So this was a bill. It ended up becoming known as the Internet Censorship Bill.
It had a whole bunch of different names as it went through the congressional process
that would allow the government to force every DNS server in the country to block certain websites.
So the effect would have been that I can't get to websites that people don't want me to get to.
Yeah. If you went to Canada, you could get to the website. If you went to Mexico, you could get to the website.
The website would still exist. The servers would all be there.
But if you tried to visit them in the U.S., you would get a blocked message.
It wasn't totally clear what would happen, but you would not be able to get to it.
It doesn't seem very practical for me to go to Canada every time I want to visit a website.
Well, you would think. Part of the Internet is that it's international.
You don't have to go to certain countries to visit certain websites.
But I guess the U.S. government wasn't so happy about that.
So now this actually was on the verge of passing.
It was almost a foregone conclusion as late as last year, or late last year.
And then something changed. What was it that happened?
Yeah, it totally turned around. I mean, that's part of what makes the story so amazing,
is that Hollywood spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year lobbying for this.
It was their major legislative initiative.
They went to the White House. They went to members of the Senate.
They said, look, we're a huge donor to all of you.
There's one thing we want, and it's this bill. You have to get us this bill.
It's all we ask for. If it doesn't happen, we'll go crazy.
And so they made it a huge bipartisan initiative.
It was about to sail through the Senate. It was going to sail through the House.
It was this close to passing.
And then what happened was the Internet community rose up and stopped it.
Now, was it individuals on the Internet, or was it some conscientious leaders of big corporations
or big organizations that made it a bit louder?
Well, so that's the interesting bit of the story.
So Hollywood wants to tell you this story that, oh, what happened was it was just Google and Yahoo,
and they all got together, and they used their big megaphones and their popular websites,
and they just lied to the American people and misled them about what happened.
And so, you know, it's not an inspirational story at all.
It's just a story of big companies lying.
Now, that is not the case, as I'll explain in my talk.
But when the bill first was going to be introduced, when it was first about to sail through the Senate,
I remember going to the Hill, and Google was there, and Yahoo was there, and all the major companies were there.
And their perspective was, look, there's nothing we can do to stop this bill.
Maybe we can make it a little bit better around the edges.
Maybe we can carve out some exemptions for us about it.
Maybe, you know, we can get some nice things thrown in in addition to the bad stuff.
But they did not think they could stop this bill.
And in fact, I spent, you know, over a year trying to persuade them that they could stop this bill,
that they should do stuff to stop this bill,
and what eventually changed their mind was not, you know, a couple executives of big companies,
but that people on the Internet who came to my group, demandprogress.org, and signed our petition,
and pushed groups like Wikipedia, open collaborative communities, to take action about this,
that then eventually forced the company's hand.
Interesting.
So that was really the turning point when it showed up on Wikipedia on the front page,
and various other organizations started raising the volume of it.
Take it from there.
What happened?
People just started, there was an Internet blackout day.
There were all kinds of all of a sudden stories in the media about this.
Yeah.
So I think, you know, to start the story a little bit earlier,
the bill was originally going to sail through, and I found out about it on a Saturday.
My friend Peter from the EFF called me.
It had been introduced the day before or something,
and it already had enough co-sponsors to pass through the entire Senate.
It was introduced with 60 co-sponsors.
They had taken the bill and walked around the Senate to all the senators
and gotten them to sign their name onto it before they'd even shown it to the public.
And so on the day the bill became public, it was already clear it was going to pass,
probably pass unanimously, and they had scheduled it for a vote in just a couple days
without any hearings or any debate or any discussion because it was seen as so uncontroversial.
So when I heard about this bill, you know, the first thing I thought was this is crazy.
There's no way Congress could actually pass something this ridiculous.
But then I went and read it, and it turned out it was all true.
It was exactly as Peter said.
It was going to censor the Internet, and we put together an online petition,
and Boing Boing and other sites got the word out,
and hundreds of thousands of people signed and called their representatives
and got the vote delayed.
And then there was this long period of trying to persuade other people to get involved
where the continual response was, that's so crazy.
That can't possibly be true.
You know, there's no way anything like this could pass.
And the moment that I think first changed the tide
was when they held the first hearings about it in the House,
and you had members of Congress saying,
well, look, I don't understand how the Internet works,
but it's full of criminals, and we've got to shut it down.
And, you know, we would show these video clips to people,
and they were just shocked, and that's what began getting people on board,
and that's what led to the big blackout day.
It's funny everyone in Congress talks like that.
That was the guy from Connecticut, I think.
Yeah, it's crazy.
So, okay, at that point, people actually started to realize,
we've got a chance of turning some heads on this and making a change.
What was the defining point for you where you realized, wow, we're going to win?
It wasn't the blackout day.
It was actually in the weeks leading up to the blackout day.
And what happened was it went from being this thing
where I and a couple of friends said, you know,
we've got to do everything about this.
We've got to throw our all into stopping it.
We've got to recruit as many people as we can
to pretty much the entire technical community believing that.
I mean, if you were on Reddit or Hacker News,
or I held a big meeting in New York of all the local startups,
and all these startup founders were saying, what can we do to stop this?
And it was no longer a bunch of activists trying to stop it.
It was now the entire technical community saw that responsibility.
And very quickly then, even before the blackout day,
you saw things began to shift.
The Republicans began backing down.
The Democrats began backing down.
And then on that day of the blackout,
when Wikipedia went dark and put up a message saying,
call your representative, and Craigslist went dark
and put up a message saying, call your representative,
and Google had a little tiny notice at the bottom of the page,
then it was just overwhelming.
Every hour there was a press release from another member of Congress
or another senator saying, yes, I know I co-sponsored the bill
and voted for it three times, but I never read it.
Now I realize it's terrible.
And I'm totally against it and was always against it.
How do people say that with a straight face,
that they never read something they signed?
They're in government.
Isn't that a requirement for being in Congress,
that you can say things like that with a straight face?
Not one that they admit to.
That's a real wake-up call.
Kind of like maybe the DMCA,
one of those pieces of bad legislation
that passed without people reading it.
Or even the Patriot Act.
People didn't read that either, did they?
They didn't have time.
No, they passed it almost immediately.
Okay, so SOPA is dead.
Can we say that, SOPA is dead?
Yeah, amazingly. I think it's true.
But you know there's going to be another SOPA.
There's going to be something else that they try.
How are they going to try and get past these people?
Well, they have tried.
Yeah, they've tried to bring it back in a couple of ways.
And so far, I think what's happened is
there's been a sea change in awareness.
It's not like it used to be where people thought,
oh, you know, we'll just be on the internet
and government can't stop us because we'll use encryption, right?
Now people realize this stuff matters
and they're paying attention.
And so we saw a couple months ago
there was this cyber security bill
where they thought, oh, there's all these cyber criminals
so we need cyber security to cyber stop them or something.
And...
They've already tried this stuff because
SOPA hasn't been dead that long, only a few months.
But they've already tried to resurrect it.
Yeah, no, it was amazing.
They gave a big speech upon introduction of this bill.
I want to be very clear, you know, because they do talk like that.
I want to be very clear.
This bill is not SOPA.
It's not anything like SOPA.
It doesn't have copyright in it anywhere.
Do not be worried about this bill.
Go worry about the other bills.
And, you know, they thought,
oh, if we just tell them it's not SOPA,
they'll suddenly stop paying attention.
But in fact, it didn't work and people paid attention
and we managed to get that bill killed too.
But they're not going to stop.
They're going to keep trying.
And eventually they're going to figure out some method
of getting around people's backs
or maybe hiding it in something else.
Are we prepared for those kind of tactics?
Well, I think the question is not, you know,
can we keep stopping it?
Can we keep stopping it?
But is there something positive we can do
to move the ball forward?
So we get some stuff that we want.
We get maybe DMCA reform
or we get compulsory licensing or something
that will actually solve these problems
instead of, you know, Hollywood's attempts
to continue to criminalize people,
to continue to increase punishments
and not actually accomplish anything positive.
Yeah, I think another effect of all of this,
another really good effect
and a great precedent that's been set
is since it was basically
the users of the internet that killed SOPA
and we've all, we all have experienced this now
and have seen it happen
and have gone from a mindset where,
okay, this stuff is all in the hands
of these people who don't understand anything
and there's nothing that can be done about it
to, hey, we beat this thing once
and when the next bad thing comes around,
we can beat that too.
So it's really sort of an empowering feeling
to have seen this all happen
and think, okay, well, next time,
maybe it won't be so terrible
because maybe we'll be able to rally our troops
and do what's right again.
Yeah, I mean, that's the most amazing thing
is that people pulled this off.
You know, I talked to staffers in Congress
and even members of Congress and senators
and when you bring up SOPA,
they just, their eyes go wide
and they were like,
I've never seen anything like it.
It's totally, you know, it totally terrified them.
They were completely scared.
We had a real impact in a way
that I think nobody thought was possible.
You know, even Chris Dodd,
a former senator and head of the plan to pass SOPA,
the guy who dreamed the whole thing up.
He's the head of the MPAA, right?
He's now the head of the MPAA
and their chief lobbyist
and invented the bill
and tried to get it passed.
You know, basically my chief nemesis.
Even he said he'd never seen anything like this
in his 50 years, you know, watching politics.
He was completely blown away by it.
It's amazing.
Well, he'll probably see it again
in case he missed any of it.
Now, tell us, Aaron, your involvement.
How did you get to be so much in the front lines on this?
You know, I think it was interesting timing
and a little bit of luck.
So I had been in the technical community for a while.
I worked on a specification called RSS
and started a company called Reddit.
And then I decided-
Well, you started Reddit.
I was one of the co-founders.
That's pretty good.
So I, you know, I was in the technical community.
I sold the company and made a bunch of money
and I figured, you know,
there's gotta be something I can do
to accomplish more good
than just starting another startup
and selling it for some money.
And that got me into the world of politics.
Larry Lessig was also doing more political work
and so I started hanging out with him
and I started learning how these things worked.
And it was basically in a period
where I was trying to figure out what to do next,
how to start something,
when I got this phone call saying,
there's this crazy bill
and we have no idea how to stop it
from some friends at the EFF.
And I thought, well, let's try this stuff out.
I think I know how this works.
Maybe we can do something.
There've been so many crazy bills over the years,
various child protection acts on the internet
and things like that.
That was the first phone call you got?
Well, I think something is different now.
I think part of it is social networking,
but there's just so many more people online, right?
You know, it used to be like,
remember the Communications Decency Act,
you would go on IRC and you'd tell a hundred friends
and they would all black out their website.
But now when you have something like Wikipedia
that has a totally global reach
that everybody depends on every day,
when you have, you know, sad to say,
but sites like Facebook
with hundreds of millions of people on them,
there are alternative outlets
for getting this information
that just weren't there before.
You know, if you had to do this a decade ago,
it would have been impossible
because the television networks refused to cover it.
And there just weren't these mechanisms
for telling the story.
How do you get the attention, though,
of people on Facebook?
You know, something has to go viral.
How do you get the attention of people at Wikipedia
so that they take up the cause?
Yeah, that was the hard part.
And that's, you know,
what I've spent the time practicing
and hopefully have figured out a bit about.
But it's about figuring out
how to frame the issue in an interesting way.
You know, the traditional way
lobbyists frame this issue
is in a very wonky way.
You know, if you had talked about this
as being a bill about DNS filtering
for copyright policy,
I don't think anyone would have paid attention.
And, you know,
I think what was the interesting contribution
was figuring out how to frame it
as they want to censor the internet.
The government wants to take control
of your internet connection
and make it something visceral
that everyone could understand
and identify with.
Now...
Go ahead, Bernie.
I wanted to ask you,
this is Bernie down in Philadelphia.
Obviously, this was a...
this was a sort of a landmark thing to happen
and unprecedented.
I would imagine that the folks at the MPAA
and the folks in Washington
have put a lot...
have gone back to the drawing board
not just for this particular bill
but to try to prevent
being blindsided again
by this sort of
grassroots internet lobbying
that happened to shut down SOPA.
So I think they're going to be more prepared
for this sort of thing next time
so they can't...
won't be like totally blindsided
and say,
oh, we never saw anything like this before.
Do you think...
do you think it's possible that...
what can people do?
Our listeners,
all of us in the internet community,
what can we do to keep this momentum going
and improve upon the results
that this...
that this yielded
so that we can sort of stay one step ahead
of the folks that would just sort of roll over us
with bad law?
Yeah, I think that's the right attitude.
You know, and so my group,
demandprogress.org,
is trying to do that.
We're trying to take...
you know, we have a million people
who took action on SOPA.
There's other groups that we're working with
that have another couple million.
And we're trying to say,
okay, what can we do next?
So there's been little bits and pieces
about an internet bill of rights
and certain positive legislation.
But the real question is
what can we come together around the internet
that will move the ball forward?
Obviously, it's very easy to all say
we want to stop this bad thing.
But the thing we have to discuss is
what can we all support that would be positive
and how can we keep moving the momentum
in our direction
rather than let them regroup and take it back?
I also think something that was key
in the success of this
was that how basically every corner of the internet
got hold of it.
It wasn't just the tech geeks
who knew the ins and outs of it.
But when your average internet user
couldn't get to Wikipedia,
they saw a page explaining it
in simple terms that they could understand.
And you had people, creative people,
creating things, great songs and stuff about it
and things to explain it to the masses.
And you had...
I was on one image board
where they explained it in cat macros.
So just all these different ways of expressing it
to get hold of people
who wouldn't normally be listening to issues like this.
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite moments was I was...
The day of the blackout,
I was sitting next to this cute girl on the train
and we got to talking
and she heard I was in technology
and she said,
oh, you know, you really need to stop soap.
Yeah, we had some fun with that.
Soap being soap in Spanish.
Soup.
Soup?
Yeah.
Oh, dear.
Oh, I got to fix something then.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So this was a pretty black and white issue though.
You know, good versus bad.
Very easy to explain to people.
How do you explain it though
to people on the internet?
Like, you know, your grandparents, people like that.
How do you do that?
Was that even attempted?
Yeah, well, I think what's interesting
is raising the first amendment aspects of it.
You know, there's a battle going on right now
to define all these civil liberties
that we take for granted in the offline world
about freedom of speech,
freedom of association,
freedom from unreasonable warrants
and, you know, wiretapping.
All of that, you know, people understand that.
They understand that they have these rights.
But when they get translated to the internet
and you put the word cyber in front of it,
suddenly it all becomes magical.
And, you know, is it a question,
do people have cyber speech too?
Do they need cyber warrants, right?
And so I think making that as clear as possible,
making them understand
there's nothing special about it being on a computer.
It's the same old stuff they've always dealt with.
That's the key.
And talking of the offline world,
I don't know if you were paying attention
to possibly the mainstream coverage
like on TV news and stuff that was coming about
because there didn't seem to be much of any.
No, there wasn't.
And like there were things like,
there was one screen grab of something off of,
I think, tech TV where they showed
somebody waving a sign around that said,
go SOPA, which it turned out had been photoshopped
from somebody holding up a sign that said quite the opposite.
And so they seem to be like a huge mass of not getting it.
Whereas on the internet, everyone knew the deal.
Yeah, well, I spoke to someone
who worked at MSNBC at the time,
and they were told from the highest levels of NBC
that you can't talk about this.
We're lobbying for the bill.
You can't oppose the bill on this network.
And so that was intentional.
Could they report on it, though?
They were told to just avoid the whole subject.
There was one MSNBC show that reported on it,
and they invited the general counsel of MSNBC
to come on and explain why it was a good thing.
And MSNBC is known as the liberal network
as opposed to Fox.
It just makes you realize where things actually stand
in the media world.
So I don't think this is a liberal versus conservative issue.
No, it's not. It's my point.
Some of the very first senators to come out against this bill
were Republicans,
particularly, I think, because Hollywood has given
historically so much money to both parties,
but more money to the Democratic Party,
and they'll do what they say.
Yeah, I mean, that's been one of the interesting things
is how on these issues, the right and the left come together.
And what you see is it's not a debate between right and left,
but it's a debate between this sort of mushy, centrist establishment
and people with real political views.
Right now, actually, we're working on a campaign,
demandprogress.org,
to get both the Democratic and Republican parties
to put Internet freedom in their party platform.
So at the convention, both candidates will have to endorse it.
Interesting.
Well, now, obviously, this is just one bill in just one country.
There are things going on all over the world.
Do the same tactics apply in Europe, for instance,
where they have...
Was it PIPA in Europe they had?
ACTA.
ACTA, right. There's so many of them.
That's the other thing. You get lost in all the different things that are happening.
If you go to the EFF webpage, there are just so many things to oppose
and to be concerned about. Where do you start?
But if you add in other countries now,
how do you possibly keep track of it all?
How do you network everybody together?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we have to do,
and that's why I'm giving this talk,
is we have to look back and see how we did it, right?
We have to see what the lessons were so that we can repeat them.
But the other part is that we have to build an identity.
And we saw a little bit about this,
and that's kind of why ACTA was stopped.
But we have to build this notion that, oh, the Internet is out there,
and they're going to come and get you.
And once that threat is there, you don't have to do it every single day.
People don't have to call in every single day.
It just has to be known that if you do try and pass this stuff,
we'll come and get you.
And that's what Hollywood has done so well.
They know if they ever try and loosen copyright
or they ever try and do something Hollywood is upset with,
they will come down with all their force and fury on members of Congress.
Now members of Congress have gotten a taste of that from the Internet as well.
And we need to make sure the whole world knows it.
Interesting.
Now your talk is actually in exactly 24 hours
from 7 to 9 o'clock tomorrow night at 99 Madison Avenue.
Aaron Schwartz will be talking about how we stopped SOPA
and presumably how we'll be stopping the next thing that comes along,
whatever that might be.
Aaron, do you ever have a problem, though, where not everyone agrees,
where it's not such a black and white issue,
where some people say, you know, I see the point, we do need this,
we need to infringe on our rights?
Because we get this in the real world all the time.
People say, well, the First Amendment is only up to a point,
and then we have to start cutting back on some rights for the nation's security.
Have you met with any resistance like that?
Well, I mean, certainly in Congress there was lots of resistance.
I mean, on the Internet.
I mean, with people that you're trying to convince.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, we got lots of, especially at the beginning,
we got lots of angry letters saying like, oh, you know,
they need to do some stuff, why are you against everything?
Isn't there anything you're for?
Wow, okay.
You know, I mean, yeah, there's always going to be dissenting people,
but I think what we showed with this was that the majority
was so overwhelmingly opposed to this bill that, you know,
even if there were a couple people on the fringe,
they were a shockingly small minority.
I mean, Hollywood tried very hard.
They spent an enormous amount of money on ads
to try and get anybody to call in favor of the bill.
I mean, we got emails.
They were literally begging directors of movies to please call into Congress
because nobody was calling into Congress to support the bill.
But they just had a really hard time
because once people understood what the bill was about,
I mean, so many people were against it.
But they didn't have to make those phone calls to start with.
The bill was on its way to being passed just because they said so, right?
It was that much power they had.
Yeah, and, you know, because they invested a lot of money in it.
I mean, they constantly are holding Hollywood fundraisers
for every member of Congress, every senator.
And so, you know, when Hollywood calls you up and says,
We want this bill, you listen to them.
Mm-hmm. Wow.
I was talking with Aaron Schwartz, giving a talk tomorrow night
at 99 Madison Avenue, 7 to 9 p.m.
Are tickets required or anything like that?
People should RSVP at illegalinstruction.com.
Okay. RSVP at is the email address.
No, no, just go to illegalinstruction.com,
and there's a web form you can fill out,
and it's got all the directions and information.
Okay. Do people have to show picture ID?
No picture ID.
Good. Okay.
Not like this place.
Not like this building.
We're going to take phone calls.
212-209-2900 if you have any questions for our guest
or any other comments on other things going on
in the hacker world, in the technological world,
in the world in general.
But please, a couple of notes in advance.
Speak when you're spoken to.
In other words, when we say you're on the air,
that's when you begin speaking.
And turn down your radio and try to talk about something
that has to do with something we're talking about.
Do you think this is going to work?
You know, I never really tried it before,
but it just seems like whenever we take phone calls
that we get a lot of confusion sometimes.
So I'm hoping that doesn't happen.
212-209-2900, let's see if it happens.
And good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
See, this is what I'm talking about, the silence.
Yeah.
You know, all you got to do is talk.
I'm going to the next person.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Please speak now.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Fine, how are you?
Pretty good, pretty good.
I'm having a little difficulty hearing you.
Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to shout.
Okay, that's fine.
It might be the phone.
All right, just quickly, how did Senator Ryan vote on this bill?
Oh, I can guess how he would have voted,
but Aaron, you want to take that?
Yeah, I mean, Congressman Ryan, like most of the Republican Party,
was originally in favor of the bill.
I mean, eventually I think it got squashed before he had to vote on it
because it was killed in the Senate
and then he was in the House at the time and didn't have to vote on it,
but he was definitely one of the proponents.
Okay, great.
I thought he might have been a senator at the time.
Okay, great.
Have a great evening.
Love your show.
Thanks for calling.
202-209-2900.
We have a full switchboard here.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
This is Chris.
Hi.
And I guess you hear me?
We hear you fine.
Okay, very good.
I've been trying to use your website, demandprogress.org,
to do some of these programs.
It's telling me that I have to put in my country,
even though I put in my zip code.
So there's a little glitch there.
I'm using Mozilla to try to use the system.
Well, put in the United States, I think, will solve that, right?
Just put in the country.
What's that?
No, but it wants a zip code if you're in the United States,
but when you click Submit it says you've got to put in the country
and there's no box to put in the country.
If you click I'm not in the U.S.,
then it gives you the option of putting in the country,
and you can put in the U.S., but then it doesn't.
I'm sure it's going to send you to the wrong box
because it wants to direct you to your own congressman.
And this is how we lose these battles because of things like this.
I'm sure that Aaron will fix this.
Are you aware of it?
Are you already texting somebody to get on it?
Yeah, I'll text him.
Thanks for the trouble report there.
Anything else you wanted to say?
Well, yeah, there's a site called downsizeddc.org,
which has some related things.
One is hands off the Internet.
They have a web form where once you've filled it in for one of their campaigns,
you've filled it in for all the campaigns, and you can send anything out.
I'm not sure your system does that, but it makes it very convenient
because you don't have to keep filling in the same boxes again,
which makes it much more convenient than using your idiot Senator Schumer's web form,
which requires 50 different spaces to be filled in.
Some of their programs are the Read the Bills Act,
which would require Congress to spend some time reading the bill before they vote for it.
So you'd have two or three weeks to generate opposition to a bill
because all this stuff is going to be coming back and probably hidden in a big budget bill.
Remember the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades was 3,000 pages long,
stuck in the things like you have to get your infant child a Social Security number.
That was hidden in there somewhere.
All this bad stuff.
The other campaign that downsizeddc.org has is one issue at a time.
Pass a bill that would require every bill to only deal with one issue.
That all makes a lot of sense, and these are good ideas.
Do you agree, Aaron, that these are good?
I think some of them go a bit too far.
Certainly it's good to have time to read the bills, and it's good to not be sneaking things through.
I think sometimes people get upset that members of Congress haven't literally read every page of a bill,
and I think it's fair that you don't read every page of a 3,000-page bill
and instead depend on experts to look at it.
The problem wasn't that they didn't read it because they wouldn't have understood it.
They don't know what DNS servers are.
The problem is they didn't bring in any experts.
They were literally shocked when we suggested bring some computer people to the hearing
so that it can explain to you what you're doing.
I consider having an expert read the bill and tell you what it means,
similar at least to reading it, but not having anybody read it.
It's really problematic.
Someone should be reading these bills.
Someone should, not just passing it on demand.
Let's try and take some more phone calls.
We have a really full switchboard here.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Hey, great show, guys.
I missed the Hacker Conferences.
A lot of that on—I have two questions.
Is a lot of that on, like, archival?
Can you, like, see Mr. Rambam's lecture?
Well, you can hear all his talks.
If you go to hope.net, you'll see links to all the audio,
and we have low-res video of at least the first three conferences up on our website as well.
If you go to store.2600.com, you'll be able to find it there for Hope, Beyond Hope, and H2K.
And we're going to get all of them up there at some point.
Okay. Do you also have Steve Rambam's number,
or how do you spell his name to get in contact with him?
Well, his name is spelled R-A-M-B-A-M,
and I believe the website is pallorium.com, P-A-L-L-O-R-I-U-M.com.
Thanks for that call. Let's move on and take another one.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up, please.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Okay, you know, we don't have time. We only have a few minutes.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook. Speak up, please.
Hello?
Hi.
Oh, hold on. Let me just take a drag.
Okay, you know, that counts as not having your radio turned on either.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up.
Yeah, hi.
Hi.
Quickly now. Quickly.
Yeah, let me just turn this radio down.
All right. I don't know what it is. You're not getting the memo, folks.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Good evening.
Hi.
I have a friend there. I'd like to call him more often than I do.
Are there any inexpensive phone cards that I could purchase to make this possible?
Yes.
Don't be a wise guy, Mike. Tell him some more information than that.
Go to the deli and say, I want to buy a phone card to call England.
You'll probably pay three cents a minute.
Is there one or two or three that are better than the rest?
I don't have a complete database in my head,
but you can probably find under a nickel a minute if you try a little bit.
The best way to find out is to ask somebody who has a friend in England
who goes around and tries different ones what his opinion is, and that's you.
So we expect to hear back from you and tell us which one is the best one
for talking to your friend in England.
Thanks so much for your call. Rob.
Also, if you go to a deli and they sell different phone cards,
they should have charts of what it costs to call each place with them,
so you can look at them and compare and get the nicest one.
You can also go on the Internet and ask around there.
I'm sure people have all kinds of opinions.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up.
Hi.
Okay, that's too long.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Too long.
What is going on here? It's like a plot of some sort.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook. Please speak.
No. I can't. I'm sorry.
Listen to the archive.
Boy, people are trying my patience today.
After driving four hours in the rain, I just can't handle this.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
You're on Off the Hook.
It's the Annoy Emmanuel show, apparently.
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Okay.
I think there ought to be a constitutional amendment
to limit any proposed word of a thousand words
to make sure that these guys actually read it in Congress.
Okay. What do you guys think about that?
I mean, I agree with what Aaron just said a few moments ago,
that it's not necessarily about the congressman
reading every single word of every single bill,
but that someone should read it.
You know, the Congress people don't have time to read every bill.
They've got more important things to do, like fundraise, and that's okay.
But someone somewhere should be reading the bills
and telling the Congress people what they say.
I think we should restructure the whole system
where it's not all about fundraising anyway.
I think airways should be free for political stuff
so that people can actually see what anyone has to say,
not just the people who raise the most money.
And maybe less time will be focused on raising money constantly
and more time on doing their jobs.
I agree with that, and so do a lot of Congress people,
but how we get from here to there is not clear.
Well, we've got to change some rules.
Yeah, I mean, the airwaves one is nice
because the FCC can do it unilaterally, right?
And Obama has appointed a majority of the FCC,
so if he wanted to, he could tell them just to say,
look, make the airwaves free for political speech.
Yeah, well, if every political ad was free from this point on.
I mean, the main thing they raise money for
is millions of dollars in TV ads.
If you just told the TV companies to host the ads
without charging them money,
they would not need to raise anywhere near as much.
Right, and the TV stations are doing just great
with all their commercials and paid programming at night
and things like that.
Let's take some more phone calls in the brief time we have left.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
I am an enchanter.
Okay, that's wonderful.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Too long.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Yes, I'm not particularly Internet savvy,
but does a proxy server allow you to get around any blocked sites?
Good question.
Yeah, I mean, if you use something like Tor
and you go to torproject.org and download Tor,
you would have been able to get around the block.
But it would have been annoying to tell everyone in America
to download this software.
I mean, maybe we could have done it,
but it's still frightening to imagine
that you have to route your traffic through another country
just to visit websites.
It's crazy.
Don't only criminals use that kind of thing.
It's just for the child pornographers
and the drug dealers and things like that.
That's what people think.
They really believe that.
And obviously, we have to educate them on that front as well.
There's also only so many countries
and only so many of those countries have fast Internet.
And if you have to route all your traffic through, say, Iceland,
it's going to be a problem.
It would be great for Iceland, though.
Yeah, well, we need to talk more about Iceland in the future.
That's for sure.
The point is you can use something like Tor,
but you shouldn't have to.
It's like asking you if you want to go to the library,
you can't go in the front door because it's nailed shut.
You have to sneak in the back window, basically.
They did that to my library,
but they're doing a lot of bad things.
Well, Aaron, I want to thank you for stopping in today
and wish you the best on your talk tomorrow.
We can make it there as well.
Again, it's at 99 Madison Avenue.
Is that a particular type of building?
It was just a storefront.
99 Madison Avenue?
It just says 99 on the front.
All right.
Well, that sounds intriguing.
Tomorrow night, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
And the website again to register?
Illegalinstruction.com.
Okay, and it's totally legal to go there.
It's totally legal now.
I wonder if that site would have been blocked by somebody.
Please go to it before they do block it.
All right, folks.
Sorry for being short on the phone, but no, I'm not really.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Stay dry.
See you next week.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.