Call the phone line 347-274-8144, that's 347-274-8144.
You can also send an email to premiums at WBAI.org, that's premiums with an S at the
end, at WBAI.org.
An operator will answer your call or reply back to your email Monday through Friday between
the hours of 9 a.m. until 6 p.m.
Thank you for your continued support to WBAI New York Pacifica Radio.
And you are listening to WBAI New York.
It's 7 o'clock time for Off The Hook.
But if they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you as another Wednesday evening begins.
Joined tonight by Mike.
Good evening.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hello.
Okay, and here we go, here we go.
We're here right now to hear Bernie S. on a new technology that we'll explain as soon as we either hear him or don't hear him.
Bernie S., are you there?
Oh my God.
Did you hear how good he sounded?
You sound so good, Bernie.
You sound like you're here in the studio with us.
Hey, Emmanuel, I cannot hear him, though.
Nor can I.
Here we go again.
This room is segregated.
Half of it can hear things, half of it can't.
All right, well, we're going to try and figure this out.
Press another button.
Oh, I see, I see.
All right, Reggie is here, and he's helping us figure out all the different buttons on this board.
Bernie, you can still hear me, though, right?
He hears himself with an annoying echo.
Oh.
Well, now you know how we feel.
No, just kidding.
Okay, we apologize to the listeners.
This is how we develop things.
This is how we develop things.
Trial by fire.
Trial by fire, for sure.
All right, now I can hear you, Emmanuel.
Okay, Mike can now hear me.
Yes.
And can you hear Bernie?
Is he talking?
You can't hear Bernie.
Max is at the door.
Well, he's louder now.
I think you can hear him through my ears.
That's one way to go about the show.
We have all kinds of technicians lining up to try and figure this out.
The upshot of it is that once we get this working, it will be good for all of us in the future.
And there are so many buttons on this board that it could take a millennium just to press them all and figure out what they all do.
That's what two to the N possibility is.
That could go on for a long time.
This is off the hook.
This is the program that experiments with technology.
Sometimes we do it live on the air.
And in the end, we wind up with something that either works or doesn't work.
It's great fun.
Well, Bernie, why don't you explain what we're doing?
That will allow us to do it without talking about doing it.
And then you can talk, and we'll just kind of try and figure out what to do.
It's a box called the Comrex where they do remotes.
But typically, they have to use expensive remote equipment.
But I did some research and found there is an application that runs on certain smartphones from a Dutch company.
It's called Lucid Live Lite.
And I installed it on my BlackBerry 10.
Actually, my BlackBerry Z30.
And after a bunch of testing over a couple, three weeks, we got it to work.
So I sound like I'm in the studio, and you sound like you're next to me.
And I'm hoping we can do this in the future without annoying echo in my ears.
And I hope those guys can hear me all.
Well, actually, while you were talking, we did figure something out that allows them to hear you.
But if you could talk maybe for another 45 seconds, we'll maybe figure something else out as well.
45 seconds.
So I want to give a shout-out to Tony Ryan for helping to make this all possible
and to Reggie Johnson for abling helping you right now.
This is an experiment.
But this opens a lot of opportunities for WBAI.
We could do live remotes from almost any mobile device, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry 10, Mac operating system, Windows.
It even has a Linux version.
So we could do live remotes from anywhere with almost any platform and sound like we're in the studio.
And that is an exciting thing.
Hello?
I see.
Okay.
Well, no, we were just trying to figure out how to get rid of your echo.
You were never not hearing echo, right?
I've been hearing myself back about 100 milliseconds more than I spoke.
Okay.
Okay.
We'll try and figure that out.
But right now we're trying to figure out how to get Mike and Rob and Kyle to hear you.
And I think you guys can hear them now.
Can they hear me now?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
All right.
Well, I can live with the echo for now.
All right.
And we don't hear the echo.
So as far as we're concerned, you're making it up.
Yeah.
So how about we do a show?
Yes.
Finally.
Okay.
Well, let's do a show.
And any ideas?
Can you hear our theme?
Yes.
Well, that's how our show would begin.
Without all the testing.
So, okay, we're going to just pretend none of that happened and start our program.
Okay.
Well, welcome, everybody.
It's good to see us all here in the studio together.
And it's good to hear you, Bernie.
Wow.
Anyone have anything special to say?
This is really freaky.
I'm not used to Bernie sounding in my ears like he does in real life.
Well, you've seen him in real life.
I've seen him, but he's in real life when he's in real life.
And you're not used to that either.
I think the really cool thing is that, Bernie, by requesting to do this,
you've kind of pushed the technological limits here at the station to a point,
not just for us,
but this capability is something anybody at the station could use, theoretically,
by tying in, as you said, with all the portable operating systems
and various devices that it works with.
It's kind of exciting for the station to take advantage of basically a piece of
equipment we already had, right?
Yeah.
This isn't going to cost the station a dime.
So it was already sitting here and not actually being used.
Now, the client software is $30.
But I spent that, and it was well worth it.
So you bought the software for the station?
Of course.
Well, for my end.
But every mobile device will need a copy.
Yeah.
The app itself that he's using that is compatible with the feature on the
hardware that the station owns, that app, I guess, costs around $30.
Okay.
Well, that's part of what we do here at Off the Hook,
is try and get things to work better.
And I think this hour we're going to sort of point that out in a couple of ways.
And not all the ways that you might expect,
because we've got some things we have to level with our listeners about.
And I think we owe it to our listeners to be honest as far as what's going on
and what we expect and what the future holds.
And hopefully it will be a bright future.
This is a fundraising program.
Yes, it is.
We're in the spring fundraiser.
It happens every year at this time.
We are asking people to call 212-209-2950, pledge whatever you can afford,
or go to the website of give2wbai.org.
And two is a number, not the word.
And you can pledge there as well.
You can become a BAI buddy,
have a particular amount withdrawn from your credit card
or your bank account every month,
and that winds up contributing quite a bit.
And we do encourage people to do this.
We do encourage people to support the radio station
and keep the radio station afloat.
But at the same time,
we also have a message to convey to our listeners concerning what I consider to be
our failure to thank them properly.
And we've been trying a lot of things,
a lot of different things over the months,
almost years to make sure that certain things are done properly.
We have a bunch of premiums that we have not yet sent out.
Now, most of that is because we've been waiting for certain things to happen
here at the radio station that simply have not been happening.
Some of that is because we have the premiums.
We are actually delivering them to the radio station,
but we wanted to deliver them all together.
And it's obvious that if we wait for everything to be done,
we'll be waiting even longer.
So we're just going to try and get part of it done
and hopefully get the rest of it done soon afterwards.
The reason why it takes so long is where we have to drop it off is well out of our way.
It's nowhere near where we need to go to.
So it's ours to do that.
And we were hoping to do it all at once.
But we have to do what's right for the listeners.
Now, I want to read to you.
I want to read to you a letter that I sent out earlier.
Actually, we started this process last week because we knew the fundraiser was coming up.
And we did not want to do this again where we come up with something amazing
and people pledge for it, people pay for it, and then they don't get it.
That's awfully annoying.
So what I did was to hopefully alleviate the situation
and allow us to move ahead knowing that our listeners were being taken care of.
I wrote this letter to our general manager saying,
I hope we can resolve the NSA thumb drive premium issue quickly.
If you recall, we had that premium available in October.
We had all the documents that Edward Snowden had released so far.
And also some people pledged for WikiLeaks data as well on a thumb drive.
And we offered that.
It was tremendously successful, raised over $8,000 for the radio station.
I hope we can resolve the NSA thumb drive premium issue quickly so we can report
that they're on the way when we go on air Wednesday in fundraising mode.
Well, here we are, Wednesday in fundraising mode, and we cannot report that.
I'm sorry to say.
Bernie is the point man on this.
He's been working hard to get these purchased by the station since last September.
Last September when we came up with the idea before the fundraiser.
Bernie has been working on this.
He has even gotten prices from vendors.
We spent several hundred dollars ourselves for a duplicator to save the station
the trouble of having to copy nearly 100 of these drives and gigs and gigs of data.
It takes a while, and we did not want the station to have to either hire people
or just spend days and days and days doing this.
So we actually went out and we bought one of these things.
It took us a couple of days to buy it.
We got it.
That's how it should work.
That's all we're asking is that the station live up to their end of it
because the whole deal was, okay, we're going to do this.
We're going to do all the work.
We're going to get all the NSA material.
We're going to get all the WikiLeaks material.
We're going to put it together in a nice little package and stick it on thumb drives.
We're going to do all that.
All you have to do is supply the thumb drives.
It was written from the beginning, agreed to.
Bernie, maybe you can go into it in just a little bit how many people agreed to this,
but, you know, with all the usual BAI and Pacifica infighting and backstabbing
and finger-pointing, nothing has gotten done, and we're fed up with it.
Let me finish with this letter, though, just so people know where we stand.
All we need is for these drives to actually be purchased.
We can do the rest, including delivering them to the station,
along with a couple of other premiums we have.
I realize there have been all kinds of staff changes and confusion throughout the network,
but we've been trying hard to get this resolved from the start,
and we hope you can cut through any remaining red tape to get this done.
The station did very well with this premium and can do well in the future with similar items.
Further delays will only make that more of a challenge.
And that, again, our letter to our general manager, Berthold Rimas, and no response to that.
And, Bernie, I know you've been speaking to the Pacifica executive director
or maybe not executive director.
We interviewed her a few weeks ago, holed up in her office,
but apparently she's been unable to get anything done on this front either.
Well, I think there's about eight different people at BAI Pacifica that I've communicated with
since back in September when I first proposed the idea of putting the NSA leaked documents
onto an 8-gigabyte flash drive.
And the then general manager, the program director, Andrew Phillips, some of us may remember him,
thought this was a fantastic premium idea.
He agreed with this.
He said he'd make sure that the station provided the thumb drives.
And shortly thereafter, he was no longer with the station.
So then some further emails to BAI went unresponded to.
And finally, I took this issue to National.
I took it to the executive director.
It took many weeks, but I finally was able to get a hold of Summer Reese,
who committed to doing whatever she had to do to get these USB flash drives.
And then the board fired her.
And, you know, it's like we're a bad luck charm.
None of these actions had anything to do with us, I don't think.
Andrew Phillips left for other reasons, and Summer Reese was, quote-unquote, fired for other reasons.
But it goes to show how hard it is to get anything done.
This is a very simple thing.
Buy the damn drives.
We made $8,000.
You know, we're talking about, what, several hundred dollars to buy these things?
I'm sorry, Bernie.
Go ahead.
Wow, Bernie, his line has been cut.
There, I'm here.
I'm back.
What happened?
Did you overmodulate or something?
Well, my smartphone only has a 3G connection where I am.
So it's got spotty data connectivity, and I can't step outside where I am right now.
So occasionally we may drop out.
Stay put.
Stay where you are.
I just heard some of your data.
Oh, really?
But anyway, it's like, what is it, just for the drives, like $500 or something?
It's about $620.
With tax and shipping and all this stuff just to get the media.
I contacted, I talked to two people that Summer Reese recommended to me at National,
who provided me with the name of a vendor that other stations have successfully used to get these USB flash drives.
I got a quote from more than one of them, got the best quote from them.
Rob there was nice enough to prepare the artwork to imprint these flash drives with, the WBA artwork.
We got the artwork in the right format to the vendor.
We got the quote all ready to go and handed it to Summer Reese and said, here it is.
This is just what you asked for.
And now it's a question of getting WBI to pay for it, which sometimes they don't even have enough money to pay their phone bill.
So that's why we couldn't make phone calls the other day.
Or actually other stations couldn't.
Other shows, yeah.
It was off about a week ago, but it didn't affect our program.
But, you know, Bernie, you've gone well above and beyond what anyone should be expected to do here.
We registered this premium back in the October drive and it was clear then,
okay, we're going to do all this work and the station will provide the thumb drives.
And that's really all that we should have had to do at that point.
We were doing all the work, collecting all the data and delivering it.
All the station had to do was buy the drives and, you know, it would be a great return on a minimal investment.
So it's really it's not fair to the listeners to keep them waiting like this.
And we're just kind of fed up because if we come up with yet another premium, it falls on us.
Our listeners get mad at us and rightfully so because we're the ones saying you're going to get these amazing things and you don't get them.
Who are you going to come to and say you guys weren't truthful?
Now, if you if you pledged for almost actually, it was a year ago.
If you pledged for the USB drives, the audio drives, remember those, the ones that you could spy on people with.
You can plug it into your computer. It's actually a microphone.
We had that at the Steve Rambam fundraiser that was very successful about a year ago.
Well, we are delivering those.
We wanted to deliver them all together.
And we've been kind of putting it off because we thought that this was going to get resolved and we could just deliver them all at once.
Well, OK, we're giving up on that and we're just going to deliver this and people will get those.
So those exist. Those will go out.
Also, if you if you order an off the hook T-shirt, we had some leftover ones of those.
I think we offered those in the autumn.
Those are also being dropped off.
So those if you're waiting for those premiums, those are definitely on the way.
But what we're upset about right now are the thumb drives, the NSA and the Wikileaks thumb drives we've been waiting for.
We found from our experience that if these things are done in small batches, they're more likely to get screwed up and lost at the station.
So doing them in one big batch is there's less to go wrong.
And when we just drop this stuff off, we have to package these.
These are done at your end, Emmanuel.
They're packaged, wrapped, ready to mail.
BIA won't let us mail them.
They make us take them to the station and they mail them.
Right. They just add a label and postage, right?
That's all it should be.
But for some reason, it takes months.
We don't know why.
All right. Well, so here's what we're doing tonight.
We are not saying don't support the radio station because that's it's stupid to say that it's stupid and self-defeating.
And it's the kind of thing that I would expect to hear from certain parties that simply like to shoot themselves in the foot.
And we try not to do that.
We try to to keep the place running.
But we have to ask our listeners to support us in a different way.
To call 212-209-2950, pledge for the generic WBAI premiums.
And we can find a list of those and go over those.
Or you can go to the website, give2wbai.org, number two.
Or you can become a BAI buddy.
And you'll get all the premiums that are listed there because those are locally produced or in the station already.
So those, that won't be a problem.
The problem seems to be when external premiums are delivered or expected to be fulfilled by the radio station.
Now, if enough people call in and say that they support this approach, that, you know, we are confronting the issue head on.
And who knows, this might rub people the wrong way.
But I'd rather be honest about it than continue upsetting people that we care about.
Because these are the people who listen to us.
These are the people who support us.
We want them to be happy.
And we don't want to be non-communicative.
Being honest is one thing.
But also just not saying anything about it and letting it continue to slide for years and years.
People will forget about their premiums.
We don't want that to happen.
And if we get no response at all, that's going to look like, okay, nobody really cares.
And we'll just replace you guys with something else because you don't have listeners that support you.
Even though that's the opposite.
But if a lot of people call up and pledge the minimum amount, and you all say we support what Off The Hook said on Wednesday night,
and let's say 100 people did that, that's going to send a message.
That's going to wake people up.
That's going to light a fire under some asses that needs to be lit.
Not only that, but the message that we really need to get across today is that, yes, we're trying to get this fixed.
We're doing everything we can to get this whole process working on our end, on the station's end.
Because we get the emails from you, and we do read them.
When you write to us and say, I pledged for X, Y, and Z, why haven't I gotten it yet?
Because we need to know that, and we need those emails to take to the station.
We need to know what's working and what's not.
And when something's not working, we're hackers.
We try and fix it.
So that's what we're doing now.
Sometimes we break it while we're fixing, but we generally wind up with something better than when we started.
And our listeners are like that as well.
So we hope that you support us in our efforts to fix this, and that's why we need to hear from you.
Just to convey that message with whatever pledge you can afford, 212-209-2950.
And let me ask you, what other radio station would you hear this kind of approach,
where we're basically putting ourselves out there saying that we have a real problem and we want to fix it.
And we will risk everything to fix that because it matters.
It really does matter.
We're not just going to sit here and tell half-truths or just expect people not to notice things that are wrong.
So we are trying to be as on top of this as possible,
and we will continue to put the pressure on to make sure this is dealt with.
And reiterate our integrity.
Yeah, if we have any left, I hope we do.
Bernie, are you still with us?
I am.
I just would ask, is there anything else that listeners can do as far as contacting the station management themselves to say,
hey, what's the deal here?
Why is our premium money being spent for other things instead of for what I paid the station for in addition to the station itself?
I mean, the station has a lot of expenses.
We have to pay for the phone bills and the transmitter rental space and all that stuff.
But to not spend the necessary money up front to get the premiums fulfilled, that's a problem.
Well, I'm glad you asked that, Bernie, because, yes, there is something people can do in addition.
They can listen to this.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Between the hours of 9 a.m. until 6 p.m.
Thank you for your continued support to WBAI New York Pacifica Radio.
Does that answer your question, Bernie?
Actually, only halfway.
I called that number to test it, and it rang.
How many times did you think it rang?
Well, you know, the other day I made a phone call, and it actually rang 35 times.
I was very surprised.
I got frustrated and hung up.
Thirty-five.
Yeah, I thought it would time out, but it didn't.
But I don't know.
How many times can a phone ring these days?
Well, I called that number repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, and it rang 20 times every time.
Twenty-two times.
And then, which is two full minutes of ringing.
Nobody waits that long for a phone call to be answered.
They hang up.
But if you hang on that long, you'll get the message that you heard to leave a message.
Actually, if you call the main number at the station headquarters at 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, you'll hear 20 rings.
And then the first thing you hear was a message to call the number you just broadcast.
And you call that number, and it rings 20 times, and you hear another message saying to leave a message.
This is not how to run a radio station.
Unfortunately, this is how a lot of things are run these days.
I was calling an airline trying to find out where a flight was arriving, and I'm using Bluetooth.
I'm driving.
It's saying you have to hit a button to do this.
I don't have buttons.
I'm on Bluetooth.
The voice activation went away.
But when the voice activation was there, I was able to get to a point where it told me what time and what gate, but didn't tell me what terminal.
And I wanted to speak to a human.
There was no way to do it.
And I find this is true of phone companies, of airlines, of all kinds of organizations and corporations.
Talking to a human seems to be an option that's going away.
It's sad to see that here as well.
But even if it doesn't answer with a human, it shouldn't take 20 rings for the auto attendant to answer.
Well, I'd like to know what kind of setting that is.
Is it possible maybe it was on call waiting or something?
I don't know.
I mean I'm almost tempted to try it now, except I didn't write down the phone number.
I called it a few days ago and it was 20 rings.
Maybe they fixed it.
I emailed the station management.
I said, hey, you should really fix this.
But apparently that hasn't been fixed yet.
All right.
Well, you know, we can have a laundry list of all the things that we think should be fixed.
And certainly getting through to a person is one of them.
But we gave an email address.
We gave a phone number.
Hopefully that's enough to at least start the process of resolving these things.
And hopefully what we're saying tonight will get word out and get these things resolved.
Hopefully next week.
We're supposed to do a two-hour show next week.
And I'm not even going to be in the country.
So I'm not sure how that's going to go.
And if we're going to have premiums at that point as well.
We're not going to have premiums if this is not resolved.
I'll tell you that right now.
Other than station premiums, which I do suggest people call in and obtain, get a BAI T-shirt.
What do we have?
We have coffee mugs.
You know what?
You call.
Why do we have the wrong phone number?
We still have that 516 number.
No, Kyle, don't rip it down.
I don't think you're supposed to rip it down.
But there is the wrong phone number on there.
Maybe it forwards.
I don't know.
But it's just kind of silly.
Ironically, those are thumb drive premiums up there.
Pacifica on a stick.
Yeah, that's the thing.
We have Pacifica on a stick.
Bernie, you mentioned that you had to actually go and get artwork to put on a thumb drive.
We already have thumb drives.
We've had thumb drives for a long time.
No, they're long thumb drives.
Those are only four gigabytes.
It doesn't matter.
It's artwork.
It can go on an eight gigabyte or any gigabyte size thumb drive.
You don't have to get new artwork because the size of the disk changes.
That's the kind of logic that we're dealing with here, though.
The correct number, we should say, is 212-209-2950.
Yes, and that number will not ring very long.
Somebody will pick that up quickly and ask you to pledge something.
And you should.
You should pledge something, whether it's a monthly amount, whether it's an amount right now.
You know the message it would send?
After saying all this right now, if we got as much as a program that was pledging actual new premiums,
because it would show that listeners, they don't really care about the premiums.
They care about the radio station.
They want the radio station to be operational and to respond to them.
And I don't think there's a better way to do that than simply to voice your concern in this manner.
I just want to remind people that call 212-209-2950.
You'll be able to ask the operator what the current premiums are.
We don't have a printout of the most recent things, but you can get all kinds of WBAI stuff as a thank you.
But any pledge level, really what we need is a show of support for off the hook tonight.
Yes, yes, please.
Let's do some stories.
Hey, maybe we can take some phone calls.
You think that might be a good idea?
People can keep it clean and not be too angry.
And we might even get some calls from Pacifica Management asking us what in God's name we're doing here.
This is a story that was forwarded to us about some interesting technology that's out there.
This actually was published in Wired, and it's all about vehicle tracking systems.
Now, the article starts,
are deploying automated license plate readers to build massive databases to identify the location of vehicles.
But one company behind this Orwellian tracking system is determined to stay out of the news.
Vigilant Solutions, founded in 2009, claims to have the nation's largest repository of license plate images,
with nearly 2 billion records stored in its National Vehicle Location Service, known as NVLS.
I just want to stop right here.
Bernie, do you have any idea how they could have 2 billion images?
We don't have that many people here.
It's not just the images.
It's the time the picture was taken and the coordinates, like the geographical coordinates of where the picture was taken.
So they basically know what license plate was where when.
I see.
And they have cameras set up.
This company sets up cameras for local, state, and federal government agencies all over.
You'll see them along the highway, under overpasses, at intersections, and a lot of intersections.
You see four cameras pointing every four directions.
And you go through that intersection, and your license plate is photographed, digitized, optical character recognitioned,
and then logged with its location and direction and all that stuff.
And it all goes into this database.
Okay, now I get it.
Okay, so that's nearly 2 billion records based on all that.
Now, despite the enormous implications of this database for the public,
any law enforcement agency that signs up for the service is sworn to avow silence by the company's terms of service.
Vigilant is clear about the reason for the secrecy.
It's to prevent customers from, quote-unquote, cooperating with media and calling attention to its database.
And that database is used by law enforcement and others to track stolen cars, vehicles used in crimes,
as well as to locate illegal immigrants, kidnapping victims, through the vast majority of license plates.
Actually, the vast majority of license plates stored belong to ordinary drivers who aren't suspected of a crime.
Now, this agreement was uncovered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Let's listen to what they say here.
You shall not create, publish, distribute, or permit any written, electronically transmitted,
or other form of publicity material that makes reference to LEARN,
L-E-A-R-N, which stands for Law Enforcement Archival and Reporting Network,
or makes reference to this agreement without first submitting the material to LEARN-NVLS
and receiving written consent from LEARN-NVLS.
This prohibition is specifically intended to prohibit users from cooperating with any media outlet to bring attention to LEARN or LEARN-NVLS.
Breach of this provision may result in LEARN-NVLS immediately termination of this agreement upon notice to you.
Okay.
It's really kind of nutty here, because think about all the attention they're now getting that this has gotten out there.
Rob?
Yeah, I think there's also a clause in there about not talking about Fight Club.
Pretty much, yes.
But what blows me away about this is, you know, we've talked about how the NSA and governmental agencies and stuff are, you know, trying to be as shady as they possibly can.
This is private enterprise doing this and holding the police to their rules now.
What happens when it's anonymously leaked?
Yeah, well, I think that's probably what happens somehow.
Someone got a hold of this.
It wasn't law enforcement.
But here's the crazy thing.
A lot of law enforcement agencies have interpreted this contract, and this is serious,
they've interpreted this contract to mean that they cannot even tell a judge about their intent to use the devices.
So that means that a lot of use of these devices is going without a warrant.
They actually think that this contract they signed supersedes their constitutional responsibilities.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, I think you are really overestimating the amount that the police departments in general care about their constitutional responsibilities.
Well, I care.
You care, I care.
I think most Americans care, and the fact that they would just do this, it's a good thing that it's being revealed like this.
So, yeah, I'm not surprised either.
I'm not surprised, but I am surprised that it's this blatant, you know.
Bernie?
I just wanted to point out that from my research in Camden, New Jersey,
I found that these systems, the local and state systems, are largely funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
So this is your federal tax dollars that are being spent primarily for all these surveillance cameras that are logging the location of your license plate wherever you go.
And this is the expenditure of our tax dollars.
We should be able to know how it's being spent and used.
And I've also wanted to point out that police have more and more been caught or not caught sometimes using other information to find suspects and prosecute them that they don't even tell the judge about.
And then they'll tell the judge they found out about the offense or the alleged conduct using some other method.
So it's kind of like the police will search your house without a warrant and find stuff and then go to get a warrant and say, hey, we heard from an anonymous source that there was this stuff in the house.
I mean, that's the kind of analogy that I'm talking about.
There are also very many stories constantly turning up about police officers using or misusing the resources available to them to spy on their significant others or that sort of thing.
So where's the accountability for this if they're not even telling the judges about it, if they think they can't talk about Fight Club?
Every part of a policeman's job is supposed to be open to due process and is supposed to be conducted in a responsible manner that lines up with the Constitution.
How is it being ensured that they're going to do that with this now?
Kyle, you and I were talking earlier in the week about which is scarier, government or corporate control of databases?
Who abuses the Constitution more?
And it's a tough race, you know, because the constitutional restrictions that are supposed to be applied to government agencies, a lot of corporations simply ignore them.
And we can see here it's hidden in a contract that, no, you're not allowed to talk about this.
And dimwitted law enforcement people think that that means that, well, they don't have to do anything.
Yeah, I think there are merits or not.
I think both have advantages and disadvantages, but both tend to abuse their whatever authority they think they have and hide behind it in one way or another.
I think it's it's it's it's the type of thing where like a private company would not have as much oversight, but maybe not as much clout amongst governing bodies or bureaucracies within government or intergovernmental relations.
So to that end, I think like as there is oversight, a government might have because they don't have as much or they have as much oversight.
Maybe they would be able to leverage their power, whereas a private company might not have as much power, but they don't have as much oversight.
Does that make sense?
Well, and in theory, a private company is supposed to be accountable not just to their shareholders, but to the law.
And the law itself is supposed to be accountable to everyone.
In practice, it doesn't always work out that way.
And I think per per the dollars that are per the the amount of money, just liquid cash.
If you would if you were like to compare a government like the amount of money they are actually able to leverage without a bunch of strings and legislation and all these things.
But like to a particular technology or particular department, the equivalent in a corporation might be like a particular department of a corporation or or maybe the whole private company.
Point is, I think private companies have a lot more money in their coffers or could get money from V.C. or whatever to then throw at some technology or something that they're gambling on.
Whereas the government's like a little slower, a little bit.
I mean, I hear these police officers.
This like tech is like kind of an echo of the tech boom in the 90s where they're like where a bunch of companies are like, OK, yeah, this isn't quite going to work.
So, you know what we should do?
Let's go talk about contracts.
Let's get some government stuff.
And like they've been trying to do that for maybe 20 years.
And and the cops are like really excited.
They have XP or something, you know, because remember, you know, old 80s and 90s movies.
There's a lot of, you know, monochrome screens and stuff.
So a lot of these organizations were using paper and and a lot of typewriters and these kinds of things up until maybe like the last 20 years.
So I think there's like this tech happy bent to it, too, with police departments.
And they're not and they're kind of using the whole it's a black box.
So, well, we just bought it and we own it now and it doesn't matter what it does, but it's a black box.
And, you know, they can get it in with a little oversight and as little as possible and then use the heck out of it and exploit everything without any kind of like oversight as being like complete afterthought.
So I think they're in this like purchase happy mode, especially like post 9-11 and stuff where it's like, yeah, we could get this and then we'll do radiation.
We'll get lasers and oh, my gosh.
Then we'll get we'll get dirigibles with with a sonar so we can drop it in the water and do all this stuff and it will make us very high tech.
But Kyle, how police officers talk in Seattle.
So the point is, I think with this with police departments, they're they're a little bit on that kind of tech happy bent where they're trying to get a cornucopia of huge mix of different tech to really prove that they're like up there.
They're like ready for the 21st century Robocop.
That's nothing.
You know, Skynet.
Forget it.
You know, we're NYPD.
So anyway, but beyond that, I think private companies are scary, scary, like a private investigator or private corporation that like these data brokers.
We saw some good.
That's I wanted to lead into that.
Actually, we saw an amazing program, which is unusual thing.
We're watching CNN.
That doesn't happen very often.
Right.
We want to find out where the plane was.
And we turned CNN doesn't have much very often.
No, that's very true.
And they weren't telling us where the plane was.
But what they did tell us, there was this program on that I'd never heard of before from this guy.
I'd never heard of before.
Name Morgan Spurlock.
That's a that's a real name, isn't it?
Called Inside Man.
And had our friend Steve on them on.
We couldn't.
In fact, you were the one who told me about it because you were you were at an airport and you saw a promo.
And there's Steve on the on the TV screen at an airport, an airport.
Muzak.
And Steve's been on our show a number of times.
He speaks at the Hope Conference is a private eye here in New York.
And he was on this program.
He's featured on this program for, I'd say, about half of it.
And his job was to get information on this Morgan Spurlock character.
And he did.
And he showed how he did it.
And he showed what kind of information was out there.
And the message was what you were talking about.
The message is how all this information is is is being held by corporations, by by governments, and not being given to the people that it's about in the first place.
It's scary.
And it's good to actually put your fingers on it and show, yeah, this is what the information is.
Here are all of your your photos that are publicly available.
If you know where to look.
Here are here.
Here's your credit card report.
Here is where you were at this particular time.
Here's information on a picture you took that shows what street corner you were standing on not 10 minutes ago.
Things like that.
And it was really educational.
And I'm I'm very picky on things like this.
When I see these kinds of programs, I always like to to to find what they're misleading about, what they're getting wrong, what they're generalizing about.
And I couldn't really find anything here.
It was surprisingly well done.
So I was I was very happy to see that.
Yeah, there was only one particular thing I think I remember where they they kind of quickly went over how access was gained to a cell phone.
But that could be intricate.
Maybe we hacked the iPhone easily hacked into his cell phone.
I mean, I guess they couldn't say exactly how they did that.
Because it was illegal without his permission.
Right.
Doing that would not be would not be legal.
But apparently it's not hard to do.
And once you have that, then you have access to all kinds of other things that somebody might do from their iPhone.
Yeah.
And from there you own the person.
I think it is scary.
I think it really it show the the exits and like metadata that's automatically put onto like iPhone photos.
I think a lot of iPhone users don't even think don't really think about that.
But there's no stripping program.
There's no way to really remove it unless you're turning off your GPS location stuff.
And other thing that was really well articulated was that everybody is interested in or or has because of data brokerage has the subject's information but that actual person.
And that speaks to what we were kind of going back and forth.
Who's got more power with the spying?
Like is it a government thing or more of a private thing?
The answer is all of them.
He did a whole Michael Moore thing where he went to a company.
Was it called Entropy or something?
I forget the name of the company.
But he went to this company to try and get his data.
And of course, they wouldn't even talk to him.
And they were very standoffish.
But you better believe that other entities don't have that kind of problem as far as handing out the information and selling it and things like that.
It's very hard to opt out of.
Bernie, do you have access to the internet by any chance?
I do.
You want me to look something up?
I'd like you to actually go into our mailing list.
I know Jens sent us an email saying when this program would be repeated.
And I'm not exactly sure because it aired on Sunday.
And I'd just like for people to see it and judge it for themselves.
But if you get it from Pirate Bay or whatever, I'm sure it doesn't matter.
Just Inside Man, what aired on Sunday.
And Who's Watching You, I believe, is the title of it.
That's right.
Who's Watching You.
The name of the series is, as you pointed out, Inside Man.
Morgan Spurlock is the guy that did the McDonald's Super Size Me movie where he ate McDonald's food.
That was him?
That's him.
That's the same guy.
Oh, okay.
Well, I have new respect for him now.
Yeah.
The very first thing he did was puke out the side of his car window because he ate too much McDonald's.
And right there, I figured that's an Emmy right there.
He didn't get it for some reason.
Our phone number is 212-209-2900.
We'd like to hear from our listeners with your views on privacy and technology and BAI and premiums and us and anything else that happens to be on your mind.
212-209-2900.
Bernie has already retrieved the info.
Yes.
The rerun of Steve Rambam on Morgan Spurlock's Inside Man will be on CNN on May 10th at 12 a.m., which is Friday midnight.
Is that Thursday night midnight or Friday night midnight?
So at the end of Thursday, like one minute after Thursday mid…
Well, yeah.
No, I'm sorry.
Very late Thursday night.
There he goes again.
He's gone.
Bernie, did you step outside again?
All right.
Can you hear me?
I hear you now.
Sorry about that.
Stay put.
The phone gets you.
Okay.
The rerun of Steve Rambam on Morgan Spurlock's Inside Man will be on CNN on May 10th at 12 a.m., which is Friday night, and again on May 16th at 11 p.m.
I think that's also Friday night.
Well, are you sure that's the same episode because it airs every Sunday?
That's apparently…
All right.
They're rerunning that particular…
According to Juntz, who's pretty good with his information, that particular episode is airing again both those nights.
All right.
Well, just look out for it, folks.
It's out there.
It's pretty good, and I'm sure if there are other things out there, please write to us, oth at 2600.com.
Let us know what those are as well.
I'd like to take some phone calls, if that's okay with everybody else.
I have an update.
You have an update?
Go ahead.
I have an update from Juntz, who says, Midnight Friday, not thirsty.
I think he means Thursday.
Thank you, Juntz.
You shouldn't be texting while you're driving, but…
All right.
So, it's midnight…
Wait.
So, Mike, what does that mean exactly?
The only information I have is midnight Friday, not thirsty.
All right.
So…
Yeah.
That's what I said.
Friday into Saturday, I think, is what Mike is saying.
Correct.
Not Thursday into Friday.
We've spent too much time on this.
All right.
I'm sure our listeners can…
Check your local listings.
Yeah.
Check any listings.
The West Coast, of course, is going to be a little bit different as well.
Okay.
We have some phone calls.
Let's see who's out there.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Speak up, please.
Go ahead.
Hi, guys.
How are you?
We're good.
How are you?
Good.
Thanks.
One quick one, and then I have a comment.
Is Emanuel Goldstein the character in 1984?
Is that a coincidence?
Emanuel Goldstein is a character in 1984, and that is no coincidence.
Oh, I mean, that's why the name Emanuel Goldstein, that's not a real name.
You picked it from 1984.
It was the appropriate name, and yes, it fell onto me.
Right.
Right.
That's as much as you're going to get out of me.
I expect we'll have some panels at Hope and in many other places where we'll discuss really
what makes a name real or not, and I think it's a very interesting question.
Am I going to be dragged onto the stage for this?
I don't think so.
I hope not.
All right.
If you want, maybe.
No, I don't want that.
Any other questions, caller?
I don't want to be dragged onto the stage.
You know, that's how Hollywood does it.
A lot of names, you know, John Wayne wasn't John Wayne's name.
It was like, you know, a very strange sounding name.
Steve Rambam, he's going to be on CNN because of why?
Thursday at midnight, meaning Friday at midnight.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
You know what?
Just go to a website, CNN or something.
Call CNN or just leave it on.
You know, pretend you're interested in the airplane.
I'm sure you'll see a promo for it.
Call the operator.
Yeah, call the operator.
Call information.
Call somebody like that.
Thanks for your call.
And speaking of being dragged onto stage at Hope, boy, did we get a flurry of speakers,
speaker submissions.
We had the deadline last week, and I said it was like, you know, when you go to a fireworks
show, at the end, there's all this hubbub of explosions in the sky.
It just goes on for like three, four minutes straight.
That's what happened to us.
We just got bombarded with all of these amazing submissions, and we're still going through
them.
So, thank you folks for sending those in.
If you were in a coma or something, you just got out of it, or you weren't paying attention,
you didn't realize the deadline had passed, and you're slamming your head into the wall
right now, stop.
Send email to speakers at hope.net.
If there is room, we will try and squeeze it in if your talk is really, really good
or if you're a super interesting person.
And even if not, there will still be ample opportunity to present your talk in one form
or another, whether it's through the unscheduled track, whether it's through lightning talks.
We'll have all kinds of methods.
HOPE is about freedom of speech.
It's about getting the word out and spreading your message and meeting all kinds of people
who agree with you and who don't agree with you as well.
So, speakers at hope.net if you're interested in that.
Volunteers at hope.net if you're interested in helping in various ways.
And boy, do we need help.
We need help in all kinds of fields.
If you have AV expertise, if you have network expertise, we certainly want to hear from you.
We certainly want to hear what you can help us with or what ideas you might have.
Because while we do things in particular ways, we're always open to doing them different ways.
And we go to many conferences around the world, and we see how other people do things.
We learn from that.
And very often, we change based on what people tell us and what people come to help show us.
So, the website is x.hope.net, and that has pretty much all the information.
And we'll have all the speaker information starting really soon.
And that'll be building up dramatically over the weeks ahead.
All right, let's take another couple of phone calls.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi.
Am I on?
You're on the air right now.
Hi.
Manuel, I wanted to bring up kind of a new subject overlooked.
NTSC was pushed off television in 1909.
And I think it's caused nothing but grief to watchers.
And my television watching has never been in 10,000 years.
I've virtually stopped watching television in the United States.
What year did you say it was pushed onto us?
2009.
Oh, 2000.
It came in late, but it came in 2009.
And it was rammed down the public that we would have digital television.
You're talking about digital?
You're talking about HDTV, like over the air?
Because NTSC is a little bit different.
Yeah, that's a video standard.
NTSC was withdrawn on us.
Yeah, that was taken.
We were forced to use this other stuff.
And without any technical help, you know, banter,
you will notice that an awful, awful lot of people stopped watching television
and have never watched since.
Well, that's not a bad thing necessarily.
But I agree it's a horrible thing what they did,
because especially for poor people who simply had a TV set
and maybe could get a fuzzy signal somewhere,
now they can't get anything unless they buy something.
And it's just not a very user-friendly solution.
There are also other components to this where there's this whole movement now
of basically people who have cut the cord
and who don't have a TV subscription or who don't watch TV
in the sense that people once did
but who just go to the Internet for the particular video content
that they want to watch, whether it's on YouTube or other venues,
commercial venues, what have you.
But, yeah, there's this whole trend away from actually having to watch things
on a network schedule, for having to pay for a package of channels
just to get the one or two you want to watch.
And it's kind of interesting.
This is sort of what draws us to radio,
because what we like is the fact that people can listen to us
without having to pay a penny.
So we ask you to help us by paying several pennies,
keeping us on the air in the first place.
But you can just turn on a radio in your car, in your home, whatever.
You don't have to have the Internet.
You don't have to have cable.
You don't have to have satellite or anything like that.
You can listen to us in other places with some of those services.
But the magic of just turning on a radio
and hearing something being broadcast over the free airwaves,
that's what's gone away pretty much with HDTV
because it's an either-or thing.
There's no bad signal.
There's only a signal or no signal.
And we seem to be moving away from the simplicity of it.
And that's what drew me in in the first place.
Would you say you feel similarly, Bernie?
Yes. Good old analog radio TV transmissions were a good thing.
I'm glad we still have analog radio,
which our listeners are hearing us on right now, many of them.
But ATSC, which is what the caller was calling about,
is harder to pick up than analog television.
You need an antenna that's got a little better gain
because if you have a weak signal, you lose bits,
and you lose the signal completely or the picture completely.
So it was just kind of a scam for the broadcasters
to get a lot of money for their frequencies.
It's a lot less forgiving a technology.
You know, I've noticed that in so many forums.
Yeah, reception-wise, yeah.
All right. You know what?
That's going to be all the calls we have time to take tonight.
I want to thank those people for calling in.
Let's spend the remainder of the show
encouraging people to support this radio station
because without this radio station, we don't have a voice.
And we have had a lot of criticism over the past hour
about the way things are being run
and how we don't think our listeners are being treated fairly,
the ones who have been supporting us in the past.
And that's our commitment to make sure that you are,
given what it is that you pledged for,
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So by calling 212-209-2950,
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And there are all kinds of premiums you can get
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If you become a BAI buddy, pledge, say, $10 a month,
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And if, say, even 10 people did that,
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by 10 people saying they're going to pay $10 a month.
And that's what we're all about,
is getting people to pitch in with small amounts
that add up to big amounts.
212-209-2950 or give to WBAI.org, number two.
And pledge whatever it is you can afford.
And if you've been waiting for premiums,
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and we are frustrated and we want this fixed.
And we're going to continue saying this until it is fixed.
And if you believe that that is sincere,
please show your support again by calling us and pledging.
And the numbers that respond to that
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212-209-2950.
Yeah, because ultimately we care enough about what we're doing here
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We think it's worth fixing.
We think it's worth getting things going in a way
that's good for you, the listener.
That's good for us, the producer.
That's good for the station.
That's good for everyone.
Because that's what we're here to do.
We're here to make good radio.
And we can't do that without your support.
So if you call 212-209-2950
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Really, we appreciate that
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This is the only thing that we do to earn our money.
Over the course of the decades that we've been on the air,
we've come up with some pretty imaginative premiums
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Things that no other station, no other show,
I don't think would dare do.
The WikiLeaks thing alone,
giving out all this information
that's really, really sensitive and secretive,
but it's out there.
So we felt it was good to gather it all into one place
and make it available.
And we've done that.
And I remember a number of years ago,
we had internet access being given out.
We had a year at a local ISP,
I think escape.com.
We gave out accounts and the phone lines exploded.
We made over $10,000 in one night
from people that wanted to get onto the internet
for the first time.
And through hackers, they were able to do that.
They weren't able to do that through other services.
It wasn't that easy back then,
but we were able to make it happen
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And the listeners voiced their support by calling.
So if we're going to continue doing that in the future
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We support the honesty.
We support the commitment to get this out there to you.
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212-209-2950.
Talk to the person on the other end
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We take all kinds of credit cards
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And if you're listening to this in the future,
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And all the options are there as well.
Including the option to specify off the hook
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which we hope you do.
Please do that, yes.
Bernie, any last words from you
with your nice improved connection
that we put together tonight?
I want to thank all the listeners
for putting up with the problems at the station,
which is still worth supporting.
And one last call to 212-209-2950
will help keep the station on the air.
All right.
Well, thank you for that.
And thank you listeners for calling in.
And in one form or another,
we'll be back next week.
212-209-2950.
All I got was a thinkin'
Don't know if it's off the hook
It's off the hook
It's off the hook
It's off the hook
It's off the hook
Guitar solo
Talkin' so long
She upsets my mind
Why you talk
For such a long time
Maybe she's leavin'
♪ Phones disconnected, unpaid bills, off the hook ♪
♪ It's off the hook ♪
♪ It's off the hook ♪
♪ It's off the hook ♪
♪ It's off the hook ♪
♪♪
♪ Don't want to see her, afraid of what I find ♪
♪ Tired of letting her upset me all the time ♪
♪ Back in the bed, started reading my book ♪
♪ Take my phone right off the hook ♪
♪ It's off the hook ♪
♪♪
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