Should In My Bowl will present pianist, composer, arranger, and producer Bob James.
This program was originally presented in June of 2006 as part of WBAI's Hip Hop Takeover.
Join us as we discussed the career of Bob James and his relationship to the hip hop
art form.
That's Sunday, December 8th at 11pm, right here on WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.com.
Org on the web.
And you're listening to WBAI New York.
It's 7 o'clock, time once again for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
One day live on for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
One day live on.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike.
Hi there.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
I'm going to say some numbers to you guys.
And I'd like to know how much you know.
It's kind of considered a test of who's paying attention, who knows certain things.
It's a code.
And you can tell me what this code is for.
Then you win a point.
And raise hands this time.
Here we go.
Zero.
And Mike, wait until I finish the code before you raise your hand.
Bernie, are you raising your hand?
I am.
And I have an acronym for that thing.
You have an acronym?
I don't want an acronym.
I have an acronym describing what that code is.
Well, I just read the code.
Eight digit code, which is very secure, by the way.
Eight digits is extremely secure.
But do you know what that code is, Bernie?
It's a former permissive action link, or PAL.
It's supposed to prevent the use of nuclear weapons, and the kinds of nuclear weapons
that were under joint control with the NATO countries in particular, from being launched
without authorization of the president.
Wait, you're saying a lot of words here now.
Nuclear missile code, permission, president.
What does all that mean?
This code was, you know, the president had somebody following around all the time with
this thing called the football.
It's like a briefcase with the nuclear launch codes.
Well, apparently, some military generals decided, well, we're not going to bother with that.
We're just going to have a default code that we're going to know.
And they made it all eight zeros.
And it was that way for many years.
Although all the same digit.
You're right.
Yeah, all of them are zeros.
Eight zeros in a row.
Interesting.
See, when you started reading the code, I thought you were reading the code to my luggage.
Are you saying you keep your luggage code as insecure as nuclear missiles in this country are kept?
Well, nuclear missiles, as we all know, ought to be kept very secure.
So, it's good enough for them.
Your luggage should be kept secure, too.
Actually, this is a total lie.
My luggage doesn't have a lock at all.
I don't think it has an eight-digit lock if it did have a lock.
But, yeah.
So, okay.
First of all, who leaked this?
How did this come out?
Anyone?
Anyone here?
I don't know.
I'm just busy changing the unlock code on my phone because it wasn't just your luggage.
Eight zeros?
So, I mean, there's...
There's a hundred million possible eight-digit codes.
It's very secure, Emmanuel.
That's like having the simplex lock where one of the possibilities is to have no code.
And nobody ever guesses that.
So, actually, it's pretty secure to not select a combination.
But, I don't know.
What's the worst thing?
Bernie, in your eyes, what could somebody have done with this information?
What would they have needed to have access to?
They could have...
Apparently, from stories I'm reading, people in the military could have launched a nuclear
missile without presidential authorization.
So, you'd have to be in the military to start with.
But they let lots of people into the military.
You and I, you and I and the average person wouldn't have been able to do diddly-squat
with that number.
Until we joined the military.
There you go.
And we'd be accepted in a heartbeat.
But once we did join the military, then we got to get access to some kind of system,
I would imagine.
And then it would say, are you sure?
And enter the eight-digit code to make sure that you were sure.
And if we got all zeros, then it would have said, okay, here we go.
And what could it have done?
From the stories I'm reading from someone who used to be working in one of these Minuteman
silos, he says that people could have launched a nuclear missile knowing that code.
These things were always just set to zero.
They're like thumbnail switches.
They weren't like a keypad, like a keyboard.
You enter it.
You could see what the code was set for.
And the military internally had instruction sheets saying, make sure these aren't set
to anything but zeros.
They mandated that they not be set to anything but zeros.
Yes.
It was free.
All right.
And everybody out there who thinks Edward Snowden is the threat, somebody leaking all
these documents, think again.
This is policy.
This is the real threat.
I mean, we talked last week about the government's sort of inability to manage a technology project
on the scale of building a large website.
Are you knocking healthcare.gov again?
No.
They had some trouble with it.
And there's a lot of people who say the government can't do anything right.
We should dismantle it and all this stuff.
But most of the same people trust the government to run a much larger technology project with
much larger consequences.
And I don't trust them with this kind of technology.
Well, you know, I'm also worried because we're not the only country in the world that has
nuclear weapons and eight-digit codes.
So I'm wondering if memos are going around to other countries now saying, hey, people
changed the code because apparently we all thought the same way.
It really gives you pause about the kind of security that we have.
Wow.
So that was quite a revelation.
Another revelation that we're just finding out about right now as I load up my computer.
Mike, you know something about this concerning the good old NSA.
The NSA was very careful when some of the previous revelations have come out.
Some of the call metadata revelations, they were very careful to point out that the call
metadata in question did not include people's location information where your phone was at any given time.
Au contraire.
And they were telling the truth.
That program did not have location information.
But what the NSA did not apparently think we would find out about was their other program,
which was revealed in The Washington Post today, that does capture lots of people's location information.
How in this day and age does the NSA think that we're not going to find out everything they're up to?
How can they possibly think that still?
They've released less than 1% of what Edward Snowden has leaked to the media.
And I would say that any secret that they have right now is not going to be secret for very long.
So these assumptions, they really should just come clean and tell the world what they've been up to.
Some people accuse me of a failure of empathy, and I just cannot get inside General Alexander's head.
I have no idea what he's thinking.
Well, there is an eight-digit code to get inside his head, and I don't know what digits those are,
but it's supposedly harder than to launch a nuke.
Probably.
Okay, so we're looking at nearly five—hang on, folks.
Everybody's sitting down. Not everybody's sitting down.
I want people to sit down because we don't need lawsuits from people who swerve in their car.
Well, you are sitting if you're in a car.
Slow down, sit down, and listen to this.
The NSA is gathering nearly five billion—that was a B—billion records a day
on the whereabouts of cell phones around the world.
What's the population of the Earth?
So what that means is if you have your eight-digit nuclear launch code
and you just take these five billion records and you assign one to every possible—you know,
distribute them equally, each launch code is going to release 50 records just per day.
Unreal. Wow.
Okay, five billion records a day, though, on the whereabouts of cell phones around the world.
That's according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials,
enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals and map their relationships
in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
Well, I think we've been imagining it, but now it's reality.
And maybe we couldn't imagine that it would be reality, but it is.
And now we've got to deal with it because this—I think this has been kind of predictable.
Now, according to this article that just appeared in The Washington Post,
the NSA doesn't target Americans' location data by design,
but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cell phones
quote-unquote incidentally, and that's a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
Not deliberate, no.
Not deliberate, but inevitable that every single one of us is going to be tracked.
If we have one of these phones that has this information transmitting, and most people do now because it's convenient.
Is that where the term accidentally on purpose came from?
I wouldn't doubt it. I wouldn't doubt it at all.
So, you know, what's left?
We knew that metadata was being kept track of, and that was bad enough because metadata is something that tells a story.
What metadata is, for those who don't know, you send an email to somebody.
I send an email to Mike, for instance.
You don't read the actual contents of the message that I send to Mike, but you know that I'm talking to Mike.
And then you see that Mike is sending a message to General Alexander of the NSA.
You're not supposed to know that.
Yeah, but I do know that because I was able to look at the metadata.
I don't know what you said to General Alexander.
I don't know what your relationship with him is, but I know you're talking to him.
And I can see that you're in this circle of intrigue involving other people.
So it just makes me cast aspersions on your character, who you are, what you're all about, just by seeing who you associate with.
That's the threat of metadata.
Now, what's interesting about this, we've been digitizing Volume 3 of 2600, which goes back to 1986, way back in the Stone Age.
And one of the stories that I happened to see, which was fascinating to me, was the concern that certain legal groups were expressing over pen registers.
And how pen registers are these devices, or were these devices, I don't know if they still exist, that basically kept track of your dialing habits.
In other words, you pick up the phone and, let's say, I call Mike on the telephone.
And there's a little piece of paper that would print out that I call that number or store it someplace in a computer file.
And it wasn't a tap, wasn't a phone tap.
It did not require a warrant.
So basically, law enforcement agencies can just slap a pen register on somebody's phone line and keep track of who they were talking to.
It's the same basic thing, metadata.
And people were concerned about it back then because it told a big story.
And we've just seen how that has grown over the years, how the same basic concerns are there, but the technology has changed.
And just to add to what you were saying about metadata, there's actually even more to it than that because it's not just that you emailed Mike.
They can see, generally, the physical location where you emailed Mike from, what time you emailed Mike, what time you send emails in general.
We can get a feel for your actual day-to-day schedule from that.
Also, what email client I used.
What email client you used, what operating system you're using, all sorts of good details like that.
So there's actually even more to metadata than most people think about when they think of who's talking to who.
I almost want to avoid the term metadata because it makes it sound like it is not data.
It is data.
And what's particularly useful to the NSA about this data is that, unlike the contents of the communication, it's very easily analyzable by computers so that you can actually analyze all of the call location data or all of the call to and from data, all this stuff that they're calling metadata.
You can analyze it all.
Communications data, if you want to read the emails that Emmanuel and I might send to each other, there's some work being done by the NSA and by others on that area.
But generally, to get useful intelligence out of it, the NSA actually has to have a human being read the email.
The metadata, what they're calling the metadata, though, computers.
Absolutely.
And they have those.
And you can summarize all sorts of things about people, groups of people.
Imagine what's going on right now in Kiev where people are gathering in the square to demand the government change.
And imagine being able to track all those people, who they're talking to, what locations they happen to be standing in at the moment.
You can summarize what they are planning, and you can track them down.
You can find them extremely easily.
And this is the kind of thing that every government in the world wants to be able to have.
It's very powerful.
So we're looking at a situation now where this is becoming more and more within their grasp, and we become less and less private as individuals.
Now, Bernie, you remember pen registers, do you not?
Yes, I still have mine.
You do? The RadioShack one?
Yeah, the CPA-1000, I think it was.
It was about the size of a desktop calculator, and you plugged it into the phone line, and you could either run it on batteries or plug it into AC current.
It would print out on a paper tape, just like a calculator paper tape, all the numbers you dialed on your phone line, whether it was pulse dialing like rotor dialing or touch tones, and all the digits you dialed during the call.
Like, for instance, you'd call some number and bank by phone or something, and you'd enter your code.
All that stuff would be printed out on the paper.
And that's the same information that law enforcement, in that article you read from Volume 3 of 2600 back in, what, 1986?
Law enforcement has been able to look at all this information, not just the numbers you dialed, but all the stuff you dialed during the call, like touch tones and stuff.
They didn't need a warrant for that stuff because you were already sharing that information with the phone company.
Therefore, it had no legal protection.
I actually remember back then, phone freaks and computer hackers would say that to basically defeat what pen registers might be gathering about you, when you connect to anything, make sure you play a nice little song on your touch tone keypad because every single one of those digits will be logged, and they'll have to figure out what it means.
So, I'm curious why it's called a pen register, but I do want to point out an important…
Oh, we explained that, too.
It has to do with ticks on an old phone system, and that's how billing…
Do you understand it, Bernie?
Yeah, before they had digital equipment, they actually literally had a pen, like on a strip chart recorder, which is like a needle with a pen attached to it, and it would draw little pulses on a moving strip of paper whenever there was a dial pulse from a rotary dial phone.
So, if you counted like six little spikes on this line, then somebody dialed the digit six on their rotary dial.
So, that's where pen register came in.
It literally was a pen registering the digits you dialed.
I miss those days.
I really do.
Old technology is so weird.
But the other thing to remember about this is even though there was no warrant required, it still took effort from the police.
They had to be like, you know, that Emmanuel character, he's suspicious.
I want his data.
What's new about these NSA programs is they get everyone's data all the time, and that's much, much more data.
And they have the processing power to really crunch it and see what the trends are.
I mean, you look at trends on social media sites, imagine that in the hands of the government, the kinds of trends they could be predicting and following and preventing.
Yeah, and to give that number five billion a little perspective, the current world population hovers somewhere around seven billion.
So, I'm a little confused.
Does that mean everybody except for two billion people are being tracked, or is that basically we count for several of those numbers?
No, I'm sure we count for many more than one of those numbers each.
But just to give it some context, you know, picture how much of a fraction of every single person alive in the world five billion would be.
And it's the majority.
It's most of the people in the world would, you know, if you counted all the people in the world, you would have counted, you know, most of them by the time you got to five billion.
And that's how many pieces of data they're playing with now.
Wow.
Well, now, we've been talking for a good part of the year about the NSA leaks and the effect they're having on us as individuals, us as a society, the government, all of that.
And, of course, that has not gone unnoticed with the people in charge.
They're affected by this as well, and they know they have to do something about it.
So, what they did was over the Thanksgiving holiday, they issued talking points to their employees, NSA talking points, because they figured that at Thanksgiving dinner, relatives might bring up the subject about all of the NSA leaks and the privacy that's being invaded.
So, they figured it might be helpful to give these talking points to the employees so they could be better equipped to answer what might be considered an attack.
Well, guess what?
That was leaked as well.
The talking points actually fell into the hands of the populace.
Let's look at a couple of them.
NSA slash CSS employees.
CSS stands for Mike.
Just getting style sheets?
No.
Rob?
Isn't that the DVD encryption?
Okay, Bernie.
Nobody.
Okay, you see, we need to learn a lot more.
I wouldn't have known this either, in all fairness.
Something security service.
Yeah, you're right.
It's part of the NSA.
Okay, something security service.
It's part of the NSA that does black bag jobs.
They break into places secretly and hook up their bugs.
Well, think of what word could best be...
Communication security service.
Think the movie Brazil, all right?
Central security service.
That's what it is.
So, National Security Agency, Central Security Service.
They issued this little memo.
Here's a couple of points.
Number one, NSA's mission is of, underlined, great value to the nation.
And here are a couple of bullet points.
NSA provides timely, actionable intelligence to political and military customers
who use that information in a range of activities,
from decision making to military operations.
Did you know they made decision making a single word?
Whose decision was that?
Well, I'm just saying.
I'm noticing little things here.
There's one thing we're learning about this whole thing,
that the NSA is really designed to keep secrets,
which means that they do not have a whole lot of really good communicators working for them.
Yeah, yeah, definitely not.
By the way, did you see our new NSA t-shirt?
We just released it a couple of days ago.
I saw a photograph on the internet.
We basically came up with a new definition of what NSA stands for,
and that's the voice from the people saying,
no such authority.
And what we did was we put a picture.
It's a picture that we took down there in Fort Meade, Maryland,
that got us in trouble,
and put a big rubber stamp on top of it saying,
no such authority.
There's more details on our website,
but we thought that was timely and fun.
Not sure how they'll take it, though.
Now here are a couple of other bullet points.
Warfighter support.
NSA has stood shoulder to shoulder with our military and coalition partners,
providing timely and actionable data so they could,
quote unquote,
see and take action against the threats they faced.
Counterterrorism.
NSA programs protect Americans and our allies.
As an example,
they have helped to understand and disrupt 54 terrorist attacks since 9-11,
25 in Europe, 11 in Asia, and 5 in Africa.
13 of those had a homeland nexus.
Wait, so by the NSA's own count,
which is almost certainly wildly inflated,
they've spent how many billions of dollars in the past decade
to prevent about one attack a year?
Can you put a price on a terrorist attack?
The NSA is.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, let's leave it to them.
And then of course our favorite,
cybersecurity.
NSA directly supports the defense of department.
Wait a minute.
This is a hard sentence to read.
NSA directly supports the defense of Department of Defense networks.
They really said that.
The defense of Department of Defense networks.
You'd think the Department of Defense could defend their own networks,
but whatever.
By translating actionable intelligence into signatures and instructions,
that can be used to actively defend the DOD networks.
And in parentheses, they say dot mil,
in case you wonder where the DOD networks are.
I don't know what that means.
There's something hidden in there.
What kind of signatures,
instructions that are being used to actively defend DOD networks?
Are they talking about attacks, malware, worms?
What?
I'd like to know.
The only thing I would say is that the NSA is part of the DOD.
So it is the DOD defending itself.
Well, number two.
Wait, that was all number one?
I'm sorry.
That was all number one.
There were four bullet points.
Now we're up to number two.
Point number two.
NSA performs its mission, underlined,
the right way, lawful, compliant,
and in a way that protects civil liberties and privacy.
All right.
All right.
You can stop laughing.
Compliant.
How many of these words are in quotes?
Well, the right way was underlined, so I don't know.
Here's the first bullet point on that one.
NSA analysts do not decide what topics to work.
They respond directly to requirements driven by the president's intelligence priorities.
Those are capitalized, intelligence priorities,
documented in the National Intelligence Priorities Framework,
also capitalized,
and managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Wow.
NSA, second bullet point.
NSA does not target U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens
unless that targeting is premised on a finding of probable cause
to believe that the person is a foreign power or the agent of a foreign power.
To believe the person is a foreign power?
NSA's activities are governed and constrained by law and policy.
We operate under oversight by all three branches of government,
legislative, judicial, and Fox News.
I'm sorry, executive.
Just kidding there.
I mean, we see, again, the NSA's really careful wording.
They use this word target, which is a word they made up and they define
so that they're not targeting you if they get and read all your data
unless they did it for some vague definition of on purpose.
But they could do it by accident, or they could do it intentionally,
but sort of not intentionally,
and they won't be targeting you.
It's all just nuts.
I don't know what we're surprised by here.
Yeah, they seem to be really trumpeting the fact that they do this
all within the regulations without mentioning that they make the regulations
and are basically spelling out, not in so many words, but basically,
yeah, we won't target you unless we think we should be targeting you,
in which case we'll target you.
Yeah, if you had read something like this, say, 20, 30 years ago,
well, it wouldn't have applied because those rules would be,
they'd be breaking the rules.
They'd be breaking the law.
When something doesn't work out, they change it so that they can get away with it.
Continuing, last two bullet points on this point.
NSA does not and will not steal industry secrets in order to give U.S. companies
a competitive advantage.
Okay, what I read out of that point right there is that NSA will steal industry secrets
to give, say, the U.S. government an advantage
or anyone else that they feel deserves that advantage.
They won't do it to give U.S. companies a competitive advantage,
but they will do it, and they have.
They've stolen encryption keys.
They've done all kinds of nefarious actions for the better good, supposedly.
NSA does not and will not demand changes by any vendor to any product,
nor does it have any authority to demand such changes.
That's kind of a strange one, isn't it?
I didn't know that was an issue, demanding changes to a product.
I mean, they're probably defining product super narrowly again
because we have talked on this program about how they've caused encryption standards
to be weakened, random number generation standards to be specific to be weakened.
Backdoors into software, things like that.
Right, so they're probably, it's another word game about what is and isn't a product,
and I don't really have the time to figure it out.
Maybe what they do is they don't demand changes, but they ask for changes,
and if they don't get the changes, then they simply go someplace else
to a company that will give them the changes.
That's how I read that.
Who knows?
Moving on to talking point number three now.
NSA performs its mission, underlined again, exceptionally well.
Yeah, that's in their opinion, I suppose.
Good for them.
We strive to be the best that we can be because that's what America requires
as part of its defense in a dangerous world.
I'm glad they're so proud of how good they are at being evil.
Bullet point number one, signals intelligence improves our knowledge
and understanding of terrorist plans and intentions.
It is one of the most powerful tools we have to protect our citizens,
neighbors, and allies.
And bullet point number two, fundamentally, NSA and partner foreign
intelligence agencies work together to protect the world's citizens
from a range of threats like terrorism, weapons proliferation, and cyber attacks.
Terrorists and weapons proliferators use the same technology many of us do,
such as email.
That is why the U.S. government compels providers to provide webmail
for these carefully identified threats.
I don't get that.
I think they mean access to webmail or something.
I don't know.
Why would you give a threat at webmail?
And what is webmail?
What is that, Gmail?
Presumably.
It's a silly word.
Okay.
We are up to point number four.
There are five points altogether, so we're almost done with this.
The people, and that's underlined, the people, because they're human beings,
folks, you've got to remember that.
These aren't like lizards from outer space.
These are people, human beings.
Also a lot of computers.
And computers, but they're not talking about the computers, not yet anyway.
They're talking about the people.
The people who work for NSA are loyal Americans with expert skills
who make sacrifices to help protect the freedoms we all cherish.
Does that mean they don't hire anybody who's not an American?
It's 100% Americans.
The NSA, yeah.
They never hire anybody who's not an American?
No.
Okay.
I'm just curious.
I mean, they work with foreign intelligence services who hire their own people.
But the check does not come from the NSA.
Well, there might be some intermediaries.
Didn't know that.
All right.
The NSA brings together the best linguists, analysts, mathematicians, comedians,
engineers, and computer scientists, one of those was not true,
in the United States to tackle some of the hardest problems in the world.
These employees, civilian, military, and contractors are public servants
who do their work knowing that their innovation and achievements serve the nation
but will never be publicly recognized.
Well, I think maybe we are publicly recognizing it now,
so their dreams are coming true.
Yes, they will get the attention they deserve.
Bullet point number two, more than 6,000 NSA cryptologists have deployed
to Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 have died in the line of duty
helping our troops accomplish their missions.
So I guess that's a ploy to get the sympathy vote because, yes,
occasionally they have to sacrifice their lives for their mission
as most missions have happened on occasion.
So I want to say, are we done?
No, we have one more bullet point.
Oh, sorry.
I don't know where the bullet points stop and start.
One more bullet and one more talking point.
Final bullet for point number four, the men and women of NSA take an oath to the Constitution,
not at the Constitution, to the Constitution.
As private citizens themselves, NSA employees are acutely aware of the importance
of upholding the Fourth Amendment, and they uphold it 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
Even in their sleep, they are upholding the Fourth Amendment.
Yeah, think about that.
Can you uphold it in your sleep?
I don't know.
I don't know if that's possible.
So, yeah, they're acutely aware of the importance of that.
I have a recurring donation to the EFF, which I guess sometimes gets processed when I sleep.
You know, they don't mention the First Amendment.
I'm not sure if they're acutely aware of that one.
Okay.
And the final talking point here, NSA is committed to, and this is the longest underline yet,
increased transparency, public dialogue, and faithful implementation of any changes
required by our overseers.
That's just a lie.
And those are the rulers of the lizard planet in Alpha Centauri.
Yeah, bullet point number one of three, we are committed to the protection of our people,
our allies, and civil liberties and privacy.
Privacy?
Really?
Their privacy.
Maybe.
I don't know about our privacy.
We will be more transparent in discussing the business of NSA, the work that we do,
the authorities under which we operate, and the governance over them to ensure that Americans
understand NSA.
And that's how you say it, too.
You don't say the NSA.
You say NSA.
I mean, so this is true.
They will be slightly more transparent.
They will now lie in public instead of saying nothing in public.
And I guess that's something of an improvement.
Their hand was forced, of course, by the reporting that's been going on.
I don't know how much credit they deserve for it.
I'm really sorry this had to leak out without their authorization because I would have loved
for them to make this as a public announcement in some fashion where they'd have to read
it in front of people with a straight face.
Go ahead, Bernie.
Emmanuel, they keep talking about their overseers and how we're responsible to our overseers,
except federal judges have found the NSA to be deceiving their overseers.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, folks in Congress, and the American public, they have
lied over and over again to deceive, to avoid oversight from their overseers.
So this is really just a lot of doublespeak if they're saying they do everything their
oversighters say, but they deceive their overseers.
I don't get it.
Okay, let's get to our final two bullet points.
The president and senior administration officials are reviewing NSA's programs, and we stand
ready to execute their policy guidance with our full support.
And the final bullet point, we encourage the American public to work with us to define
the way ahead in balancing transparency and national security.
We embrace public dialogue.
Well, you know what?
They should be just thrilled, then, with what's going on now, with all the leaks, all the
discussion, all the things yet to come.
Think about it.
There's going to be a lot of public dialogue, and we certainly will be engaging the NSA
in that.
So, I don't know.
What do you predict for the months, years ahead?
So there is one sort of underlying point in all this that I agree with the NSA on.
That surprised me, that there was anything I agree with them.
The point that they are just a cog, they're a large cog, but in a much larger machine.
And they fulfill the orders of that machine.
And I think they're right.
I think to really fully destroy what the NSA is doing, we have to destroy the whole machine.
But the people who work for the NSA should be aware that they are cogs in this larger
cog, to really strain the metaphor.
And they can opt out of this system.
You don't have to help this continue.
If you want it to stop, it needs all its pieces to keep going.
So, people who are in school or whatever, you have career choices, and you don't have
to work for the NSA, or for NSA, as they like to say.
Yes.
I want to bring this up, because I just saw this last night.
There's a BBC program called Hard Talk.
Did you see it?
It's a half hour of basically somebody being questioned.
And in this particular case, they had Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Edward
Snowden story, along with Laura Poitras.
And it was simply staggering to see how this guy was being mercilessly attacked, allegedly
by another journalist, who simply did not understand, apparently, what journalism is
all about.
That you have a source of information, and you basically are supposed to tell the truth.
You're supposed to tell the truth.
You're supposed to release things to the public, if it's in the public interest, even if the
government doesn't want you to do this.
And this guy in the program was being treated like a criminal.
Like, the journalist is the criminal, because he has a story that's sensitive to a government.
And he should have given it back.
He should have turned in the guy.
Who knows what the host of the program wanted him to do.
But it was just incredible.
It was like Glenn Greenwald was trying to explain what journalism is to a guy that just
was not getting it.
It's worth watching.
It's kind of shocking to see how clueless the guy is.
I don't think he was just putting on a show to have talking points.
I think he genuinely did not get the importance of these revelations, and why it's a good
thing to have transparency, and to have things like this revealed, and how Edward Snowden
is actually doing something courageous and noble.
And it's sad to think that this might represent the majority of quote-unquote journalists
out there in the world.
People who work for mass media and newspapers.
People who would sit on a story rather than release the details.
You know, there's one thing that Glenn Greenwald said concerning being told something by an
authority figure.
He didn't actually say this in his words.
These are kind of my words.
But to always assume you're being lied to by somebody in power.
To question that.
To dig a little deeper.
To just look for the actual evidence.
And so when the government comes to you and says, yeah, it's important that you not release
this to the public.
You ask why.
The guy interviewing him would not have asked why.
He would have simply, yes, okay, here, take it.
Take everything.
And just make sure you leave me alone, and I don't make any waves.
It takes a lot of guts to do something like this.
For Edward Snowden to do this.
For Glenn Greenwald to do this.
For even The Guardian.
Did you see The Guardian being questioned in England yesterday?
It was pretty shocking.
At one point they asked the editor of The Guardian, do you love this country?
It was like the McCarthy hearings.
Exactly.
It was very McCarthy-esque.
Yeah.
What was his reply?
His reply was, I'm surprised you asked me that.
And we have a whole bunch of people who work for The Guardian who are citizens of this
country.
They all love their country.
And this is about democracy.
This is about telling the truth and letting people know what's going on.
What the actual story is.
And that's an inherent part of what the country is.
So, in a way, it's very unpleasant to see this kind of thing happen.
It's also a very necessary thing to have it happen and for the right people to
come through it and to come through it strongly.
So, did you see that, Bernie?
I did.
Actually, I heard the one with the Guardian guy.
Right.
I heard part of it on BBC or something called The World, a program last night.
And I read the transcript and it does read like a McCarthy hearing-type
interrogation where the inquisitors are, they really know the points they want to
make and they really aren't even questions as they are assertions and
accusations.
Yeah, exactly.
I really like the program.
It's interesting to see somebody because usually the people that they have up
there are people that have a lot of explaining to do.
But in this particular case, it's a journalist.
Oh, the Glenn Greenwald thing.
Yeah, the guy should know damn well what he's supposed to be doing and why he
does what he does.
Any journalist should and should respect that and should emulate that.
So, it was kind of dismaying to see that, especially on the BBC.
But, again, of course, the BBC is an organ of the UK, the UK government.
Of the Queen.
Of the Queen herself.
She's been very silent on this.
What's this about, Bernie?
I understand you reported this story to us, that the U.S.
government was caught using pirated software for the military.
Is that true?
Not a lot.
We only settled for about $50 million worth of software pirating.
This is the U.S. Army.
Supposedly, they used software from a company called Aptricity.
I'm not really sure what this software does, but they licensed a few copies of
it and decided they wanted to spread it out to dozens of servers and thousands of
standalone devices like workstations.
Well, the license they had allowed them to use it on five servers and 150
standalone devices.
Apparently, they stepped over that line, like so many other people do, and some
of whom are prosecuted and charged or at least sued for damages.
In this case, the company sued for almost a quarter million dollars, but the U.S.
government, the Army, settled for $50 million.
Well, actually, try a quarter billion dollars.
I'm sorry, I missed three.
I was only off like by ten.
Yeah, they sued the U.S.
government $224 million.
Now, the reason for that is because here's the fee, and this is why software is so
crazy sometimes.
To install this on a server would cost $1.35 million.
I don't know what kind of software this is.
Per server.
Per server, $1.35 million and $5,000 per device, per standalone device.
Apparently, the U.S.
government did like so many of us do and said, you know what, we've got copies of
this.
We're just going to copy it ourselves and use it as much as we want.
It's hard for me to pick sides here because I agree with that sentiment, but at
the same time, the U.S.
government is being incredibly hypocritical by doing what they prosecute people
for.
It's not the first time, obviously.
What does the software do?
A million dollars a seat?
I don't know what it could possibly do.
I'd like a copy of this.
Maybe somebody in the Army could send me a copy so I could analyze it.
Whatever this software does, it seems like a ripe opportunity for the open
source community to come out with a free version.
Yeah, exactly.
Or for a competitor to sell a copy for only half a million dollars a seat.
Yeah, let's get the Ubuntu version.
I'm sure it'd probably run better.
Okay, we want to talk about something, and this is the science fiction part of
the program, because occasionally you hear these stories and you don't know
whether to believe that they're actually happening or that you're just
hallucinating.
But I heard the story a few days ago about Amazon designing drones to deliver
packages to us.
Yes, we are actually looking at a world where in a year or two there will be
flying quadcopters in the sky, or the equivalent of them, with packages from
Amazon dropping them off at our doorstep.
We've known drones are coming.
We've known that there's evil drones out there and that we're going to see
more and more of them.
But I didn't see this coming.
I didn't see Amazon, which is huge, filling the sky with drones now with
little packages.
And what I ask people on Twitter and what I'd like to ask people now over the
air is for you to, when we take phone calls in just a couple of minutes, tell
us what you think the first thing that's going to go horribly wrong, or maybe
the most dramatically horribly wrong thing that will happen with Amazon
drones.
I've thought of a few already.
I've thought of people that grab the drones and bring them inside their
homes.
I've thought of toddlers grabbing onto them and being sucked away into the
sky.
I've thought of drones colliding with competitor drones and packages falling
out of the sky, literally packages falling out of the sky with DVDs and
records and who knows what else people are ordering.
That's just off the top of my head.
You have one?
So I think you were right to describe this as the science fiction part of the
show.
I think this is largely, if not entirely, a marketing stunt as the holiday
shopping season approaches.
Amazon wants to be all over the news and they're succeeding.
I think it's totally not accurate when they say that this will be commercially
available in a couple of years.
So wait, okay, you're making a prediction here.
You're saying that when we look back on this in a couple of years, there will
be no Amazon drones in the sky.
There might be one.
I know I'm going to play this part of the show back in the future.
I've been wrong before.
All right.
Well, this could be another time then, so get ready.
What do you think, Bernie?
You think there will be Amazon drones to look at?
No, this is purely a publicity stunt, but a very good one.
Wait, how can you just predict something that's going to happen and then not
do it?
I mean, people are going to remember, right?
The laws of physics just don't allow delivery of Amazon orders by drone.
It just doesn't...
Well, the laws of physics, I mean, they go up in the air, they move over to
someone's house, and they go down, and they gently drop the package off by the
doorstep, and they leave again.
Yeah, but the package is way more than these things can usually lift and carry
for any significant distance.
You can't go more than a mile or so with these drones without running out of
battery power.
Well, it's a 10-mile radius around a fulfillment center, and I imagine we'll
be seeing more fulfillment centers.
But most things that people order on Amazon aren't that heavy, most things.
So I imagine if you buy a car engine or something on Amazon, that's probably not
going to be going through the sky to you.
This is for people that want to get whatever it is they want within an hour or a
couple of hours.
Of course, you'll pay a premium for that.
But mostly, I think people are going to be ordering things just so they can see
the drone come.
So that's going to be kind of crazy right there.
I also don't understand how this is even alleged to work for multistory
buildings.
That's a good idea.
Good point.
I mean, I don't know.
Yeah, for an apartment, where is it going to go?
It's not going to go to your balcony.
I don't think so.
Maybe the roof, maybe the doorman downstairs.
I don't have a doorman.
Well, I don't know if you qualify then.
Yeah, these things in New York City, can you imagine that?
Drones?
As if we don't have enough to worry about.
All right, so I'm still taking predictions.
And 212-209-2900 is our phone number.
Rob, do you have a prediction on something that could go horribly wrong?
I would be very interested to see how the permits for something like this would
work when they yell at people for flying remote-controlled helicopters and things
in certain areas without authorization.
But, you know, Amazon is a large company, so maybe it can buy better laws than
people get.
All right.
Mike, can you think of something that might go wrong?
If this is true, that is.
I don't think it's going to happen.
So you don't think anything could go wrong.
I mean, just imagine in a world where it is possible.
I don't think the technology is there.
I don't think the law is there.
In 10 years, when it's maybe possible, ask me then.
So you can't think of something in 10 years that might go horribly wrong.
All right, fine.
Bernie, how about you?
We might have nuclear war before then, and the whole thing's moot.
Who knows?
All right.
You know, you can say that about anything.
But anyway, no, I think the drones are, if they ever launch these crazy things,
they're going to be very valuable pieces of equipment, and people will steal them.
And they might get decapitated by the rotating blades in the process of
stealing them.
But in any case, it's going to be a mess.
It's not going to work.
I'm thinking of new things right now.
I'm thinking of becoming an Amazon merchant yourself and creating a product
that you know is going to offend somebody, and then having a drone take that right
to their home and drop it in front of their house and know that you've done that
within an hour.
Maybe something that, when it lands, inflates, like a giant rat outside
somebody's house.
Things like that.
Use your imagination.
Okay, so in this imaginary world where the Amazon drones do happen and become
commonplace, that will then become, I think, an interesting avenue to maybe
deliver things to people disguised as an Amazon drone that they might not
necessarily want.
Yeah, the military will get involved in this.
They'll have pseudo-Amazon drones that are actually assassin drones.
I mean, we've seen all sorts of things happen with military drones right now,
and this technology is always developed by the military first.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
And good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Yeah, I think it's possible that the drones could be intercepted and then
somebody could, you know, alter whatever's in the package.
Interesting.
So sort of like an episode of 24 or something where somebody just grabs the
drone and there's no record of this actually happening, and they insert
something and it maybe blows up when it reaches the person's house.
Yeah, like a Trojan horse, you know, something like that.
Okay, all right.
That's a good idea.
I mean, not a good idea, but a good scenario.
Thanks for that.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi.
Speak up, please.
Go ahead.
What's on your mind?
Sure.
So I have a comment about the drones.
So I'm not really sure if this would work.
I mean, there are SAA regulations.
How would these vehicles, if that's what you want to classify them as,
how would they interfere with,
or could they possibly interfere with airplanes and helicopters
and flyovers by the military and stuff?
I just don't get how they would fit into the existing airspace
and the restrictions and limitations on airspace
and other legitimate commercial air transportation vehicles.
I just don't see it.
Well, think of 100 years ago when there were no airplanes in the sky,
or very few.
And looking at the world today where there's airplanes all over the place,
people would ask the same question,
how do you keep them all from colliding into each other?
And I think the answer would be an improved way of air traffic control,
but I'm not sure if the benefits outweigh the risks.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
Right now the FAA has a restriction on the height that these drones can be flown,
ostensibly to keep them below the height at which airplanes fly.
So that's one of the, you know,
altitude is one of the answers to this woman's question.
That's how you keep them apart.
But, of course, then you collide with birds and all kinds of transmitters
and various other unpredictable things, other drones.
And, you know, basically people interfering with them in all sorts of different ways.
Imagine that, people on the ground with slingshots
or whatever else that a kid might come up with seeing a drone go by.
The imagination is our only limit here.
All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yes, hello.
What's up?
I will say that while anything is possible,
this idea with drones, the smaller drones,
isn't that what they've been trying to push on the public drones?
And the way to get them to use the drones would be to say,
well, we're doing it for your delivery needs.
You know what I mean?
And then all of a sudden they'll be using the drones for every other purpose.
I wonder.
Yeah, well, think about that.
A drone that can be sent to your home within an hour,
it's not just going to be coming from Amazon.
It can come from, I don't know, the unpaid parking ticket people.
Who knows?
All those people can invade your privacy with cameras
or delivery items that you don't want or various things like that.
So, yeah, it's something that we're going to have to get used to, I think.
You can already send people things they don't want through the mail.
Yeah, but it doesn't come out of the sky and land in their front yard.
You know, that's a bit more intrusive.
It comes from the postal carrier and lands in your front yard.
What's the difference?
It's not only a mailbox.
It's a letter.
These are objects.
You can send objects through the mail.
They have that technology now.
Okay, but, you know, there's all kinds of evil uses for this.
You could drop them from the sky onto people's homes.
You could do that.
I'm thinking creatively here.
This is a whole new technology.
It's at least as possible as anything else that a rival wizard is going to come
and turn Jeff Bezos back into a hawk as anything else.
Okay, well, that's your nightmare.
My nightmare are things coming out of the sky that we don't want,
that we can't control.
This is fantasy technology and fantasy regulation in a marketing campaign
that we're giving a lot of airtime, so it's working very well.
Well, I still don't get how it benefits anybody to talk about fantasy technology
that doesn't happen.
I do believe this will happen.
No, it's a marketing campaign for 2013,
and they're getting people excited about the company that's promoting this
technology and getting people to go to their website and buy things.
That's how it works.
That's how people translate interest in something.
They go to a website and buy something.
They go to the website to watch the video of the flying thing,
and then they're like, oh, I'm on this website.
I could use a new razor blade.
I didn't know there was a video on their website about this.
I just went to the news sites to find out about this.
But thanks for telling me that.
I'm going to go to their website now,
and I'll just buy whatever is in my line of sight.
You might buy a quadcopter kit.
They probably sell them.
Can I get that delivered by quadcopter?
I don't believe so.
Wow.
Imagine drug delivery.
All right.
That gets interesting.
If you want to, say, get something delivered from, oh, I don't know,
the state of Washington or Colorado to New York,
a quadcopter would be a great way to do that.
FedEx is a lot easier.
It is.
It is for now.
All right.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Speak up.
Yes.
I think it's a good program you have right now.
I think it's very interesting.
You raise very good points.
I think, frankly,
it's a way of legitimizing this whole concept of drones and warfare,
drones here at home, monitoring people's movements and things of that
nature.
And, yeah, you know, it's being used, or at least the thought of,
you know, for marketing purposes and all that.
That's, you know, a horrible thing to do.
Again, it legitimizes the use of this kind of delivery system
if you will.
In this case, supposedly for beneficial means, you know,
for good purposes supposedly.
But, again, it legitimizes its use, and that's quite unfortunate.
But I think it's a good program that you have this evening.
Well, thanks for calling.
Thanks for listening.
And I hope to hear from you again.
And, yes, it's true.
Any technology can be used for good or for evil.
And I guess we'll see both uses if this technology ever comes to be.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead, please.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
You're on the air.
Thank you.
Do you guys remember the movie Runaway?
Runaway what?
Just Runaway?
Runaway was with Tom Selleck.
It was 1979 to 1981, and it was about drone technology
and how drone technology were created by the government,
but a private corporation developed them and began sending the people
to destroy their adversaries and enemies.
And, of course, Tom Selleck was the great hero cop.
It was filmed in Seattle,
synchronicity with the development of the Silicon Valley there.
And maybe the truth of science fiction
and storytelling is part of the Google ploy.
I don't think it's possible as of yet,
but we must remember that a story that becomes public
and discussed openly is something that someone else is planning to use
for nefarious purposes, perhaps.
All right.
Interesting thoughts.
Thanks for the tip.
I'll make sure and check out that film.
And now we know to blame Tom Selleck for giving people ideas
on drone technology way back in the 70s.
Hey, this Friday coming up is the first Friday of the month, isn't that right?
Indeed it is.
What does that mean?
It means there are 2,600 meetings all over the world.
There's one by you, possibly.
All over the world.
I'd like to read something, actually, from our friends in Kansas City.
That's Kansas City, Kansas, not Kansas City, Missouri.
We have friends there, too, but these are the Kansas, Kansas City people.
And they had an adventure with one of their recent meetings.
They write on their website,
Way back in 1998, some of us were gathered around the pay phones at Oak Park Mall
back when the Kansas City 2,600 meetings were in the food court
and pay phones were a thing you could find at a mall.
One of us had an acoustic coupler hooked up
and had dialed into a Unix server at a nearby college
to turn in some homework for a summer class.
Some lady freaked out at this scene and made quite a ruckus.
Mall security escorted us all out of the building,
and there were a few other times before that when mall security hassled us
in some way or another, but it's been a good solid 15 years.
I guess, in the words of this writer, we weren't trying hard enough.
Last night, eight folks met on the top floor of the east parking garage
to look at the surrounding terrain
in hopes of testing out a wireless mesh setup
that we'd been tinkering with the last few months.
Our hope was to find a spot far away with line of sight
for some high-gain directional antennas operating under FCC Part 97 rules.
Some folks on the parking garage, some others out in the distance.
Maybe it was the laptops on the roofs of cars.
Maybe it was the camera with a two-foot-long telephoto lens
being used as a telescope.
The mall guards seemed nice and interested in the experiment
once we explained it to them,
but apparently the property management powers that be
were not happy with a bunch of 25- to 60-year-olds
hanging out in an unusual, far-off part of their precious parking structure.
We headed indoors to the 2600 meeting for a while,
then took the wireless mesh equipment to a nearby park before sundown.
For what it's worth, there's no hard feelings.
What we were doing looked a lot like loitering,
even though we were mall patrons looking to experiment with technology
we plan on putting into place for public service.
That, my friends, is the spirit of 2600 meetings.
Experimentation, a little bit of mischief,
and telling everybody what happens.
So if you don't have a 2600 meeting in your town, start one.
First Friday of the month, usually from around 5 to 8 p.m.,
you can get a full listing of all the 2600 meetings in the world,
www.2600.com slash meetings,
and you can also hear all the shows that we have ever done
on this particular radio station, and other ones as well.
Just go to www.2600.com slash off-the-hook.
We're not on next week.
Yeah, there's another fundraiser, believe it or not,
but we'll be on in two weeks.
I guess by then, maybe things will be different in Ukraine, we'll see.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com, with your feedback,
and we will see you in two weeks. Good night.
We're not on next week.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com, with your feedback,
and we will see you in two weeks. Good night.
We're not on next week.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com, with your feedback,
and we will see you in two weeks. Good night.
We're not pigs, we're not goats.
We are Ukraine, a thin wall.
Now or never, go and wait.
Together we have a lot, we can't overcome it.
We're not pigs, we're not goats.
We are Ukraine, a thin wall.
Now or never, go and wait.
Together we have a lot, we can't overcome it.
We're not pigs, we're not goats.
We are Ukraine, a thin wall.
Now or never, go and wait.
Together we have a lot, we can't overcome it.