Women in Radio and TV presents Gender Equality in the Media.
It's in the boss room, yes, the boss room, of the UN Church Centre,
East 44th Street at First Avenue, right across from the UN.
That's March 13th, 2.30pm.
Tell them Frida sent you.
Hey, this is Chaka Khan, and you're listening to WBAI New York, 99.5 FM.
And yes, this is WBAI New York.
The time is 7 o'clock on a Wednesday.
And every now and then, that means it's time for Off The Hook.
Off The Hook.
Off The Hook.
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.
Kyle.
Yes, I am present.
And Bernie S.
Greetings from Pennsylvania.
Well, OK, we were not on last week, but we are on this week,
and hopefully we will be on every week from now on until eternity.
We have all kinds of updates, all kinds of things to fill people in on
in the world of technology and hacking and privacy and all sorts of other things.
And we invite your phone calls a little bit later on in the program, 212-209-2900.
And, of course, our email address continues to be oth at 2600.com.
All right.
We should update people on, I guess, the issue that we're getting so much mail about.
I'm going to read one piece of mail, all right, because I don't want to fixate on this too much,
but it's an issue that absolutely has to be addressed.
And we want to fix it, and we will fix it.
This person, Anita, writes in to say,
I'm not sure if you'll be able to help, but I've written to WBAI.
I have not received a response.
October of last year, I donated $150 to the radio station in return.
I was to receive the HopeX DVD set.
It did say allow six to eight weeks for delivery, which would have made it the end of December.
Given the holidays, I gave it extra time.
Our listeners are so patient.
I still have not received it.
I tried to cancel it.
Yeah, and that's what people have to do sometimes.
When I put in my order number, it says the order either shipped or is in the final stages of processing.
It never shipped.
It's been over four months.
I'm still waiting.
Can anything be done?
Well, Anita, we have been racking our brains and going berserk trying to fix the situation.
Here's what we know.
There was some kind of a slip-up in the offices in Brooklyn where the wrong premium was sent out.
Now the computer system is saying that the premiums were sent out, even though they were not.
The right ones were not.
Some people got the wrong ones.
What we are trying to do now, and it's hard to do because we have communication issues.
To be honest, this last week, it was completely on us.
We did not communicate the way we were supposed to communicate with the people who are trying to fix this in Brooklyn.
I hereby vow to get on top of this tomorrow.
We will get on top of this tomorrow, and we will have at least the communications open.
People are trying to fix the situation.
Right now, we have a computer system that thinks it did what it's supposed to do, and it didn't because somebody typed the wrong thing in.
I don't know.
The reason I know that people have not gotten their HopeX DVD sets or flash drives from the autumn fundraiser.
It's funny.
We're past the winter fundraiser, and we're talking about the autumn fundraiser.
The reason I know that people haven't gotten that is because we have not brought those premiums to the radio station in order to send them out.
We cannot do that until we're told how many are needed.
It's a simple question.
Simple question.
How many should we bring in?
I think we've all experienced this to some degree, whether it's within your own family, at school, at work, where you're trying to ask a simple question,
and the people that you're asking it of simply don't understand or are misunderstanding, or you're not making it clear, or something like that is happening.
We have been trying to get this information.
Very simple thing.
How many?
Answers range from, no, we already took care of it.
I don't have access to this information.
This is not my job, et cetera, et cetera.
Going through every possible stage of denial.
But we are going to continue to.
There's this program on television called Shameless.
It's about a family in Chicago.
There's one in England in Manchester, the original.
This family is always messing things up one way or another.
They get a chance, and they cheat on each other.
They lie.
They steal.
We're not like that.
But we are a family.
We do tend to have problems sometimes with various arguments, inefficiencies, and things like that.
One thing you learn from the show Shameless is that you stick with your family.
All right?
No matter how screwed up they are, you stick with them.
And BAI is our family.
And we have all kinds of issues.
There have been all kinds of issues over the decades.
We consider our listeners part of that family, too.
We hope you stick with us because we do intend to work this out.
And unlike Shameless, I think we'll have a happy ending.
Is that a fair comparison?
Yeah.
Yeah, that looks-
I don't think it's ever been made before.
Well, it's an interesting comparison.
But it's certainly something we're working on very actively.
And we're looking forward to just basically-
We're all ready to go as far as the items that we owe listeners for past premiums.
It's really verifying that pledges have been paid up and then getting a final tally of the right numbers for each item that has to be sent out.
But we're essentially waiting to get those numbers so we can bring those items to the station and have them sent out from there.
So, it's really about syncing up and getting accurate numbers.
Again, we have been in communication with people there.
And this last week has been completely our fault because we were supposed to follow up on an email where somebody was actually asking us to clarify something.
And we never did.
So, that's on us.
And we have no problem admitting when it's our fault.
So, in the next 24 hours, we are going to take the next step.
And hopefully, by next week at this time, we can say it's been resolved.
All right?
I want to thank the listeners, Anita, everybody else out there for their incredible patience.
So many people have written in and said it's not about the premium.
It's about supporting the radio station.
And that really is what it should be about.
A couple of weeks ago, we went on the air and we just asked for people to call in without getting any premium.
And we had so many people call in.
That was really, really great, pledging whatever they could afford.
That is really, I think, the backbone of listener-supported radio, people that just want to support the place.
Emmanuel?
Go ahead.
I just want to point out that even though we did drop the ball this past week,
we have been asking WBAI for months for the numbers of different premiums that we had offered back in October 2014.
And we have yet to get any meaningful response.
So, that's what's going on.
And we say we have a computer system.
It's not our computer system.
It's a computer system at WBAI that we don't have access to.
And nobody is apparently willing or able to give us the information that is on that computer system.
So, that's where the problem seems to be.
Did you listen to our show, Bernie?
I mean, you hear what hackers do with computer systems.
Would you give access to a bunch of hackers?
I think there's other reasons that maybe WBAI management doesn't want folks to look at what's on that computer.
But I'm just speculating.
I don't know what that means.
I'm just speculating.
Yeah, we'll speculate away.
But the fact is, I mean, one of the main reasons is that we've had severe staff reductions over the last couple of years.
And there aren't the same number of people around to do this.
A lot of work falls on one or two people.
And, you know, we understand a lot of responsibility is involved in running a place like this.
So, we all have to delegate responsibilities and share the workload and things like that.
And that's what we're trying to do right now is getting these premiums to our listeners.
That's our share, donating these things.
And we will do it.
We will.
As you can see, we're not letting go of the issue.
And I don't want to spend the whole show talking about this.
I think that addresses the issue.
If anyone has specific problems that they want to write to us about, we will try to resolve them.
OTH at 2600.com.
But if you're waiting for your autumn 2014 premiums, we know about it.
You don't have to write to us about that.
We know very well what's going on there.
And that's what we're trying to work on right now.
If you have other problems with other fundraisers in the past, please write to us and let us know.
And we'll look into those as well.
Okay.
So, to follow up with some other things from our last program, we had Jason Scott on talking about the latest restrictions from Google
and the blogger.com website not allowing adult content anymore.
First of all, Jason's okay.
We lost him in the middle of the show.
He suddenly cut out and we couldn't find him and couldn't get back in touch with him.
His phone died.
His phone just simply ran out of power.
And, you know, folks, this is another reason why landlines are better because they don't run out of power and leave you hanging in the middle of a radio show.
You know, I don't want to cast aspersions, but I've been to the Internet Archive.
They have a wonderful space.
There's a lot of electricity there.
There is a lot of electricity, but is there a landline?
Well, you could plug in your phone and then you won't run out of electricity.
Apparently, yeah.
If you don't have your charger with you, what do you do then?
Ah, that's the problem.
Yes.
So that's one of the things to keep in mind.
Landlines.
Hold on to your landlines, folks.
Hold on to them.
Although, you know, we're having kind of a lot of issues with landlines on the island with Verizon.
You know, if you ever dare to go to a different company, I'm not going to say what company we switched over to, but if you have a problem with the actual phone line, you can't talk to Verizon directly.
You have to talk to your phone company, who then contacts Verizon, and then Verizon goes, looks for the problem, says there is no problem, comes back and tells your phone company to tell you there's no problem.
But you know, in fact, that there actually is a problem.
But if you could just talk to the person face-to-face, you'd be able to explain the problem to them.
And this kind of thing literally has been going on for months.
We have a phone line that goes out every time it rains.
We know the problem is not in the facility.
We know the problem is out in the field.
And the thing is when the Verizon guy comes to check it out, the rain is over, so that line appears to be fine, and it's not.
Wait, Emmanuel, what's the average response time between when you call and when he comes?
Usually 24 to 48 hours.
But I don't call him.
I call them.
They're in a foreign country, and they have to somehow contact Verizon, send him over, send the Verizon guy.
Oh, he is just one guy now.
And then maybe he'll call.
He'll call the line that's not working, though, so that's a problem.
Or he'll get back to them, and they'll say everything's fixed when, okay, it might be okay now because it's a sunny day, but it won't be okay when it rains.
What you have to do is you have to look at the weather forecast, and 48 hours before it rains, that's when you start the process.
Well, I did something a little bit better than that.
We had a lot of snow this year, and the snow is now melting.
And apparently melting snow causes the same condition as pouring rain, and it's going to be melting for days.
So they actually sent the guy out today, and he reported back to my phone company somewhere in a foreign country that called me and said, we detected a problem.
There's a problem out in the field somewhere, and we're going to try and fix it now.
So that's what you have to do when you leave Verizon behind.
Yeah, and I think you've got the wait time down to like 48 minutes now.
As soon as you call and report it, they're out there immediately because you've called about this before.
But I want to just give a little background.
I think a lot of this has to do with the old phone systems and the older cabling types.
A lot of aerial lines and trunks out on Long Island and in all parts of the country often are made out of lead, and sometimes it can crack and allow moisture and other things to disturb the copper.
And the phone companies themselves aren't necessarily incentivized to go out and invest in those aging systems.
They'd rather squeeze every penny out of that copper they can, and by just maybe letting it fall by the wayside, it's a lot cheaper and so on.
But it sounds like they really figured out from where to where it might actually be cracked or otherwise susceptible to weather, and I'm really encouraged.
I really hope that they're buying tons and tons of cable and they're planning to just completely redo the whole thing.
I'm very optimistic.
I am too, but there's more to it than that.
There are bad feelings, Kyle.
There are definitely bad feelings because this is a relationship that I broke off, and I told them the signs were in the air.
I told them that we were having trouble, and when the time came and I went to a different company, I don't think they forgot that.
It reminds me back when I was involved also with Verizon and DSL years ago, and I broke it off with them and went with a different company.
But you still had to use Verizon circuits, and every time the DSL line went out, it was this whole big extended outage.
No, no, no.
And they are still upset now.
No, they are still upset now that I am not going.
We've had people say, if only you were with Verizon, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
That's their M.O.
No, no, no, no, not now.
They are going to fix it.
Don't jinx it.
It's like don't look at it the wrong way because this could actually change the tide of the situation.
Well, I'm bitter.
I am, and it's hard to let go of that.
It's important to be bigger about this.
In any event, Google is hostily hijacking people's blogger accounts.
Okay, all right.
You know what?
It's funny.
Wasn't that fun?
We started talking about that.
Then we got into Jason Scott and his cellular phone, and we have so much to talk about.
We could be on for six hours, and every topic leads to three others.
Without anyone knowing, they're taking these accounts and turning them into family-friendly accounts.
Oh, but Kyle, you are not updated because Google apparently was either listening to our show or listening to the internet, probably the latter, and they reversed their decision.
So now they are allowing those adult content sites to remain on Blogger following a barrage of criticism that they received.
So happy news for those of you with adult content on Blogger.com.
The back-paddling ensues.
It's not the first time we've seen things like this happen, and it certainly won't be the last time, but it goes to show people power, you know?
No, that's fantastic.
It's good to be heard.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
I just want to point out.
I wanted to mention a correction to something Kyle said with that Verizon is not an incentive.
It hasn't been an incentive to rebuild its copper infrastructure.
It's not true.
They've had decades of incentives and guaranteed profits through their monopoly service for many, many years,
and they've pocketed those profits very profitably.
And unfortunately, Verizon is choosing to allow their copper infrastructure to rot so that people will have no choice but to go to alternative service like Fios or something.
And by the way, if you choose Fios, Verizon Fios, which is fiber optic to the house, you are no longer allowed to get a dial-up, a copper phone line, a plain old phone line at your home anymore.
Even if you discontinue the Fios service, you can't get it.
It's in the contract.
So it's burning a bridge.
If you ever get Fios, you can never get reliable plain old telephone service again from Verizon.
I'm with you on that, Bernie.
I think that's a succinct assessment, and yeah, by squeezing every last penny, that's absolutely what I meant.
It's not that they're going to go and give that penny away.
They absolutely keep that for their shareholders and their interests beyond developing their infrastructure.
I have a question, though, about what you just said, Bernie, about the Fios contract.
Now, if somebody gets Fios at a house and then they sell the house or move out or something like that, does the next resident also have to live by those terms?
No, because the next resident is not the person who signed that contract.
But the person who signed the contract saying that I'm going to buy Fios and I agree that I will never get plain old telephone service again.
It says in the contract you will never get a landline.
I don't have it in front of me, but that's the effective verbiage, that you agree that you will no longer be able to get copper telephone service, plain old reliable landline service again at that residential address.
That is part of the Fios contract, and this has been discussed on different mailing lists and so forth.
Bernie, that sounds great.
I would much rather have Fios at my apartment than a landline telephone line.
Well, Mike, there are certain situations where you might regret that, because let's say you lose power for an extended period of time, it does happen.
Who am I going to talk to?
Well, okay, I guess that's a fair point.
It sounds like a personal problem.
Yeah, it does sound more like that.
Who am I going to call on the landline telephone?
Anybody you would call on any other telephone?
But they don't have electricity either.
You don't need electricity for a landline.
Yeah, it seems like we're moving backwards in time here.
Who do you want to talk to?
I mean, you should be able to talk to anybody you please, or nobody.
But the fact is, that was technology that worked in different scenarios, and to be forced to give that up, I don't like being forced to do anything, to be honest.
All right, but maybe it's an exercise for the listener.
If you have a Fios line, try canceling it and getting a regular landline put in, and just see what happens.
Well, both. You can't have both is the problem.
So, I think my blog is decent, and Google doesn't.
Wait, we're back to Google now? Okay.
I don't know.
The point is, and I guess this is the theme that we keep coming back to, if you give the power of decisions to a corporation someplace, they will make those decisions, and you will be perilous.
So, avoid situations like that.
But we're here to empower you.
That's my advice, yes.
You should get a non-corporate landline telephone.
There you go.
Or just one that affords you some freedom to do as you wish.
Okay, here's another update from a listener.
Hi, last show someone talked about their issue returning items and having to give photo ID.
Remember that call?
I called the Victoria's Secret customer service number that the caller had also called to complain to.
I asked if it had to do with any kind of federal law, as that caller was told by somebody in the store.
They said, no, it has nothing to do with federal law.
It has been a policy from the Retail Federation.
I went to their website at theretailequation.com, and they have info on preventing fraud by returning items.
People apparently take an item off the shelf and bring it to the cashier and ask for a refund or credit, and this is what they're trying to prevent.
Thanks, Richard from Nassau, for writing in with that.
I just don't understand how presenting a driver's license prevents that.
They can track the frequency of returns, and if they find you a frequent abuser of return privileges, they will ban you from –
if you look, you will see that they have a policy that if you start returning a lot of stuff, they won't let you return any more stuff.
Okay, but what I – I'm naive as far as this kind of thing goes, but isn't there some other system that's failing?
If you're able to take something off the shelf, bring it to the cashier, and say, give me money for this?
It seems to me it's not presenting a driver's license that's the problem here.
It's that they don't know what they've sold and what they haven't sold.
Well, people will try to – some people steal stuff at retail.
Okay, then the theft is the problem.
That is the problem, and then they will try to return it without a receipt saying, look, this is your brand on it.
Obviously, it's your product.
They won't give you cash or credit on your credit card, but they will give you store credit.
But they track that, and if they see you do it a lot, they suspect you as a thief, and then they won't let you return stuff.
Okay, well, then my next question is what happens if you don't have a driver's license?
What happens if you're a juvenile?
What happens if you just don't believe in carrying ID?
You're not required to do that.
Then you can't return the item.
Wow.
My understanding of loss prevention, too, is often they will keep information like that and correlate it with closed-circuit stuff after the fact.
They may not catch you doing that in the process, but if anything suspicious comes up accounting-wise, they can go back and look at the tapes and then correlate it with a particular driver's license.
Is this just true in Victoria's Secret, or is it true in all retail outlets everywhere?
I'm just talking about loss prevention in general, that often the tapes aren't scrutinized right there live.
It's after the fact, and it's most likely – I think most frequently – well, saying most frequently is probably a bit presumptuous.
But it's often that something happened accounting-wise that is an indiscrepancy, and they need to go back and investigate, and they have the tapes there.
If they were able to go another step and look at the person's – well, whatever fake license they provide, then they can pursue whatever guilty sucker.
Most stores make a policy decision that they would rather not have it be so impossible to steal something that the shopping experience is unpleasant, like it is at B&H.
Can you imagine if you went to buy a T-shirt and it had to be sent all around the store by conveyor belt?
I love shopping at B&H.
I don't want to sound like a commercial, but it's just so much fun to go in there and just see how they have the system worked out.
It goes on that little conveyor belt everywhere.
It's highly entertaining, and you might one day want to buy something.
It's efficient, too.
It actually works.
That's what surprises me, that it actually works.
But can you imagine if every purchase you ever made had to go through that system?
That would not be entertaining.
It depends how fast the conveyor belt is moving.
Bernie, have you ever been to that store?
It's amazing.
Actually, the only time I've been there is during a HOPE conference when we needed some piece of equipment in a hurry or a cable or something.
Well, not on a Friday or Saturday you wouldn't be there.
You're right.
And that's when HOPE conferences tend to take place.
On the Thursday before we set up for HOPE.
But, yeah, it's an amazing, almost like a Rube Goldberg thing with all these conveyor belts.
But it works.
It's very efficient.
But as Mike pointed out, people do like to go into stores and touch and feel and fondle the product before they buy it.
And you can't really do that at B&H.
Okay.
Well, I can sort of understand why you wouldn't want people doing that.
But, yeah, it's a tradeoff.
You're right.
Okay, moving on because we have so many things to talk about.
People were having trouble last show that we did, the two-hour show, two weeks ago.
And a lot of people were having trouble downloading it.
Well, there's a reason for that.
The reason for that is that we're extremely popular.
It sucks, I know.
Everybody was trying to download it.
And we have a cap on our website.
And we reached that cap.
And the solution is for us to get a bigger cap and pay more money for something we already volunteered to do.
And we just can't justify that right now.
The other solution is for you guys to use the torrents that we put up and download it in that way.
Or to just take a little bit longer or download it a little bit later.
Or for us not to be so popular.
Well, it also had to do with a longer show.
Yes, longer show, bigger size of the file.
We'll see what happens this time.
It might be a two-week gap as well.
That makes people want a fix of Off the Hook all the more.
So we're sorry about that.
We are aware of it.
Not much we can do about it at this point.
Unless somebody wants to donate a whole lot of bandwidth to us for all of our website needs.
And it can't just be for the show.
All right, we have the big news, of course.
Also having to do with the internet.
Also having to do with email.
We're talking, of course, about the Hillary Clinton scandal.
She ran her own mail servers.
Can you believe that?
The things that we have been suggesting people do for years now.
Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton apparently have been doing this.
What is the...
Bernie, do you have the actual name of the site they were running?
I believe it was ClintonOneMail.com.
Was the domain...
No, actually, you know what?
It looks like that because it's ClintonEmail.com.
So it looks like it spells ClintOneMail, but it's actually ClintonEmail.com.
Got it.
So if you wanted to mail Hillary Clinton, you would mail hdr22 at ClintonEmail.com.
I have a feeling she's going to be abandoning that email address pretty soon.
They got their own domain and still the username space is crowded?
Yeah, why not call it something...
Why not just like Hillary?
A little less institutional.
It was originally Bill's.
Apparently it was originally Bill's mail server and then that he uses his foundation.
I don't know.
But she decided to use that, too, for reasons that we can discuss,
maybe to avoid transparency, that sort of thing.
But this is really an astounding story,
and it really speaks to the kind of stuff we talk about all the time on the show.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Now, what I'm curious about, though...
I'm just wondering.
I'm looking at this email address.
This is the first time I've seen this.
hdr22 is an email address that she used.
Why 22?
Anybody have any idea why that would be?
No.
Was she the 22nd person on that system to have those initials?
I mean, that's what Mike was talking about.
Yeah, I mean, my best guess is that either this is a number that's meaningful to her for some reason
or she deliberately chose an email address that was hard to guess
so that people couldn't just email Hillary at ClintonEmail.com and reach her.
Actually, that does work, too.
Hillary at ClintonEmail.com works.
So does h.clinton at ClintonEmail.com.
That works, as well.
Okay, I guess the real question here, though, is she was supposed to be using a governmental email address,
which who knows?
It might have been clunky or just...
It might have existed and just been very idle.
That's true, too.
Is it a law or is it a rule that states that you have to use an institutional email address
when you're Secretary of State?
It is a law.
Is it a law now?
Yes.
Not just the guidelines of...
It's a recent change, but yes, it's a law.
While she was Secretary of State, President Obama signed the Federal Records Act of 2009,
which not only, in effect, discouraged the use of personal email for official business,
but required heads of departments, and she was the head of the Department of State, to use this.
Now, some of the stuff she said at a press conference yesterday was flat wrong,
and I'm not happy about this.
I think we should all have access to these public records,
and only Hillary has decided what she's going to show to the public that was exchanged on that mail server.
But you're saying before 2009 it was possible to do this?
Apparently.
It's vague.
It's sort of like an encouragement or discouragement kind of thing, but there was a...
It depends on who you are.
If you are the head of a department, then you were required to do official business
over the official email account, official as in .gov, and she didn't do that.
One thing I'm curious about is if it was something that was thought through on their part,
if they really felt that they could circumvent this and gain from doing that,
how would it serve them, and did they actually deliberately set up things that were forwarding to that particular domain,
and to what extent this was configured the way it was is really sort of interesting in light of all of that.
Yeah, I might have a bit more of a naive view on this,
but I'm trying to figure out is it effective government to have every single word that you utter while you're in office open to public scrutiny?
I know we want to be transparent, but is that something really that is realistic?
What's the downside?
Well, maybe you have to say some unsavory things to get somebody to see your side.
Maybe you have to actually... I'm just thinking personal experience.
Sometimes not everything I say to somebody is something I want open to public scrutiny,
and I could see that being the case with somebody in a position of power.
Now, I know being a representative of the most powerful country in the world, you should be open to more scrutiny.
I get that, but I can also see how that could be a hindrance to somebody if they're trying to get a desired result,
and that's not an endorsement of the desired result.
It's just I'm trying to get into their head, and I'd like to get out of it now.
Do you remember the Bradley Manning or Chelsea Manning trove of State Department cables that came out years ago through WikiLeaks?
Yes, and embarrassed every country on Earth.
Exactly. There was a lot of information in there, and that's the kind of stuff you're talking about.
They were really frank with those communications.
I'm really intrigued that in this whole public discussion about Hillary's e-mails,
why there isn't also a discussion about the State Department cables.
What's the difference between State Department e-mails, the Clinton e-mails, the Clinton e-mail server, and State Department cables?
There must be a different infrastructure for the State Department cables.
It must be some sort of closed network with a secure classified communication, which got busted open by Chelsea Manning,
so we got to actually see some of that stuff.
The whole cables thing is not part of this discussion, and I think it should be.
I don't know the answer to your specific question, but that material was classified and would not be subject to these disclosure rules
because the government never wants us to see anything that is classified.
We saw in those cables and in countless other cases where government officials do over-classify stuff precisely to prevent its public release
because it would embarrass them, and that is a scandal that we have talked about before
and I think is possibly more interesting than the current scandal.
Let me ask this then. As far as e-mail goes, does that mean that e-mail is by rule not ever classified?
I don't think the answer to that is yes.
Basically, they're saying that anything that was sent from the official government website or mail server should be accessible,
or am I missing something? Are they not saying that it just should have been sent from that account?
My understanding, which is super limited, is that there's sort of like a non-classified e-mail system that she was not using,
and you can't put classified material on the non-classified system.
Okay. And nor can you use an outside system for either non-classified or classified.
It would be much more illegal, not that she would get in trouble for it, but it would be much more illegal
if she was transmitting classified information on this private system.
That's what Petraeus is being charged with right now for conveying classified information out of bounds.
Precisely. He dropped off a bunch of books, I think.
Yeah. But had he e-mailed classified stuff to his mistress, it would have been the same charge.
Right, right.
All right. Well, this is a story that I guess we'll continue following,
even though it seems kind of a strange story for everybody to be fixated by.
But I'm impressed. I'm impressed that they were running their own mail server, all right? There's that.
I don't think she was running it.
Somebody, what was it, Chelsea? Who was running it?
I think they hired, my guess is they hired a contractor.
Maybe I'm underestimating.
I haven't heard from Bill in a while. He's probably figuring out Linux by now.
Yeah.
Emmanuel, one of our listeners did some research, he may call in tonight,
and has concluded from his research, and he spent a bit of time on it,
that this mail server was not actually located in the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York,
that he thinks it was hosted in Florida somewhere.
Well, that's not uncommon for people to have co-location.
Right, but Hillary said it was in the house there.
So we'll see how this pans out.
You know, I've told people my mail server is in a place that it's not.
I don't know if that's necessary. Are you required to tell people where your mail server is?
If you're being questioned by the press on this about what you did while you were in an official capacity,
I think it's relevant that you should be able to have to say the truth.
I don't think so. I mean, you know, there are certain things that just aren't their business.
Where your mail server is, I don't think that's anyone's business, but that's my own personal view.
So two things about this. One is that it's fairly clear they're using some sort of like filtering,
de-spam, whatever service that the mail goes to before it goes to wherever the actual mail server is.
So it's possible that both the listener and the Clintons are telling the truth here.
And the second thing is, just the most absurd thing that I've read in this whole story is
people claiming that, noting that the Clintons' home is protected by the Secret Service
and therefore this is a safe place for the mail server, clearly do not understand how the Internet works.
Wow. You know, I still have a suspicion that this whole story is concocted just to keep Fox News busy,
which it certainly is right now. Anyway, moving on, I want you guys to remember this name,
Alain Philippon. Can you say that? Alain Philippon?
Alain Philippon.
Mike, can you say that? No. All right. You're not going to be a part of this campaign. Bernie?
Alain Philippon.
You said that very nicely. This guy is a hero. This guy, I think, is one of our newest heroes.
He's from Quebec. He is charged with obstructing border officials by refusing to give up his smartphone password.
He says he will fight the charge. This case has raised a whole new legal question in Canada.
He basically refused to divulge his cell phone password to Canada Border Services Agency
during a customs search a couple of Mondays ago in Halifax.
He had arrived on a flight from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic.
He's been charged under a section of the Customs Act for hindering or preventing border officials
from performing their role under the act.
This kind of thing is simply unbelievable to me that people think, and a lot of people do think this now,
they think this is part of what customs can do.
Yes, you know, it's part of a search. You have to give them your password.
No, no, no, no. You do not have to give them your password. You should not give them your password.
And what Alain Philippon is doing, it takes guts, but it has to be done.
It has to be done. You should never, ever give out your password to your cell phone, to your computer,
to any device, to anybody, customs official, police, anyone.
Once you give this right up, it is not coming back, and basically you will be required
to basically share your entire life with any law enforcement official that claims they need to look.
I'm curious why some people could say, you know what, I can't remember my password.
There's that.
That's the Ronald Reagan defense. Remember during the whole Iran-Contra thing, he was deposed,
and he said, I can't recall, I can't recall.
Yeah.
You know, and maybe he had Alzheimer's, but I kind of don't believe.
I think they're less likely to believe that you don't remember the password to the phone you were just using.
Could be, but I mean, how can they prove that? You know, it's like people forget stuff.
Oh, you know, this was such a stressful experience.
And there's all this historical stuff, like the Hillary Clinton thing reminds me so much
of the Watergate tapes, Nixon's Watergate tapes, where he didn't want to give,
remember he didn't want to turn them over to Congress to be transcribed,
and then some of this stuff is mysteriously deleted, the 18-minute gap.
I mean, I see a lot of parallels in all this technology stuff decades later.
It's interesting.
Well, let's move Hillary Clinton out of this story, because this is not her story.
This is Alain Philippon. Did you wish to speak about it?
Well, I once went to Canada, more than once, but once went to Canada,
and I'm not Canadian, so they don't have to let me in.
But they asked me where I was staying, which is a reasonable question,
and the answer to that question was inside my phone, so I pulled out my phone.
That's what you told them? I'm staying inside my phone?
What a wise guy you are.
I pulled out my phone and looked up the address and told them,
and then they took my phone from me and started poking around further.
Wow.
I don't know if it was intentional to get around my password. I suspect it wasn't.
Was I with you at the time, or was I being strip-searched in the other room?
No, this is a trip you were not on.
Okay. Wow. That's something I feel very strongly about.
People do not have the right to just rifle through your private affairs like that.
If they're searching your house and they have a search warrant, that's one thing.
I'm not happy about it, but it does happen.
But no, you can't just take somebody's phone and gather all that information,
because it's invading other people's privacy as well as your own.
It's completely wrong.
It's always good, too, at borders, to be very mindful of what they're asking you,
how many times they're asking you these things, and maybe be prepared for some of that, too.
But that's an interesting story, Mike. That's crazy.
We're going to follow Alain Philippon's case and see how that goes,
but somebody like this who has the guts to stand up to this kind of thing deserves all of our support.
I hope that he gets it, and I hope that this has a happy ending, because it will affect all of us.
This involves Canada.
We have similar types of situations here in the United States,
and I know there are horror stories that a bunch of people can tell us.
I have not experienced that yet. I expect to at some point.
It's the kind of thing you go to jail for. It really is.
Protecting your privacy. Bernie.
There is some case law in this country where people claim that if they give up their password,
that is, requiring somebody to give up their password is a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights,
because it could be incriminating information.
But then the Justice Department came back during the George W. Bush administration,
and they came back and said, well, the password itself, the content of the password itself,
just the passphrase, is in and of itself not incriminating.
Therefore, it doesn't violate the Fifth Amendment.
So I thought you should have like an admission to something in your password,
so you can say that your password in it truly is incriminating,
and therefore you can't reveal it because it's a violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Bernie, you have to open a law practice just to give out great pieces of advice like that.
I just cannot believe that that was their response.
The passphrase itself does not contain it.
But it's a tool. It's like giving somebody a key to your door.
But that was the Justice Department's finding.
This is the kind of people that were like legalizing torture and stuff, so you can't be too surprised.
Because the word torture doesn't hurt anybody.
Of course.
I think this is interesting.
I'm curious about where biometrics fit into this, because you can't forget your fingerprint, obviously.
And those are sometimes used with some of these devices.
I'm not really sure. I don't own a lot of them.
But you definitely have the option of having an actual password and some biometrics go for both,
because a fingerprint is going to be on your person.
Okay. And then there is ISIS, of course.
We've been hearing about ISIS or ISIL or IS, whatever you want to call them.
But it seems like our media really wants to call them ISIS, so let's do that for now.
Apparently, they've been on a hacking spree, or that's how it appears.
Anyway, a South Mississippi restaurant's website was hacked over the weekend by someone claiming to be the terror group ISIS.
They were called The Shed in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.
But they weren't alone.
Over the weekend, other businesses across the nation fell victim to the same cyber attack.
The Shed co-owner, Brooke Lewis, said a customer informed her Saturday afternoon that the restaurant's website had a disturbing message sprawled across the homepage.
We do live music every weekend.
They were looking for the live music lineup, and they noticed on the homepage the ISIS statement, and they immediately called us.
She was out of town, but the restaurant's web team was already on it and had the image removed within three hours.
They found a weak plug-in in one of our graphic areas of our site, and we disabled that, and we were back up and running in no time.
The message, by the way, read, hacked by ISIS.
We are everywhere.
Yeah, and this has been happening.
There was a folk singer had her website hacked, a bar manager, a NASCAR champion.
A NASCAR champion had his webpage hacked by ISIS, supposedly.
Now, personally, I don't think this is really ISIS.
I think ISIS is basically doing all kinds of other things, like destroying history and beheading people.
I don't know if they're spending a lot of time hacking websites of small businesses and NASCAR drivers.
It seems to me like this is the Internet syndrome where people like to get attention, and what better way to get attention than to say you're with ISIS?
If only it had been a halal restaurant.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, I mean, maybe they serve pork, and that's the issue here.
But I would just like to advise, in case we have any people who are not so bright who are listening, don't do this.
If you get caught, you'll get in so much more trouble than you would if you just put a funny cat picture or something.
Yeah, people really don't react well to this kind of thing, and law enforcement certainly doesn't as well.
There is a business called Softcard.
It was acquired by Google recently, and now the end is near for them.
I don't know if it's because they were acquired by Google.
Actually, it might have been, but they used to be called ISIS.
They're shutting down on March 31st.
They say the former ISIS slash Softcard site will be closing down.
They changed their name last year to avoid association with the terrorist group.
I don't know how many people would think that a mobile payment joint venture with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon was affiliated also with ISIS.
But you'll never go broke underestimating the – I'm sorry, go ahead.
They called it the ISIS Mobile Wallet before they changed the name after the ISIS terrorist group came out of the woodwork.
Then it just went downhill from there.
All right.
Hey, our phone number, 212-209-2900, if our listeners out there would like to chime in and talk about various other things going on in the world.
According to ABC News, actually a lot of the media, hackers have stolen one billion email addresses in a spam scheme.
One billion.
It used to be a million was a big number.
Now – and, of course, we know this isn't a hacker thing.
This is what the mass media likes to call hacking.
But the way – I just thought the story was so funny.
Computer hackers stole a whopping one billion email addresses from U.S. marketing companies in what federal authorities on Friday described as a massive spam scheme.
And three people apparently have been indicted.
There's not much hacking going on there.
It's just basically harvesting email, kind of what a lot of commercial entities do anyway.
Just – and, you know, spam is something that we get all the time.
So, that's not the crime either.
It's just basically copying one billion email addresses.
I'm just amazed that there's a billion email addresses, period.
All right.
212-209-2900.
Let's check in with some of our listeners who we have not heard from in a while.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yeah, okay.
You're going to talk on the air?
You may.
You're going to talk on the air right now, in fact.
I'm sorry.
I hear Emanuel still.
Okay.
Yes, because it's a seven-second delay.
All right.
I'm going to shut that, and I'm going to talk to you then.
Okay.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
He did.
Okay.
So, my original plan was to just to look at Hillary's server and see if it was – I would
come back to you.
Okay.
All right.
I'm going to shut that, and I'm going to talk to you then.
Okay.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
He did.
Okay.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
Okay.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
All right.
I'm the guy who mentioned to you about the Hillary server being in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
I believe Bernie predicted you would call.
That's right.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Very good.
Thank you.
Speak up, please.
Hello?
He hung up.
Oh, he hung up.
Maybe he wasn't a numerologist.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi, Emmanuel.
Hi, what's up?
First off, I want to apologize for you not having your normal engineer in the studio
tonight.
He just showed up at my door because I gave him some bad information about whether or
not you were still on the air.
Well, I'm the engineer, so I don't, as far as I know, I'm here, but...
Well, Rob T. Firefly is not.
Okay.
Hi there.
Rob says hi.
But I briefly wanted to go back to the earlier issue that you guys had been having with your
copper telephone line.
Yeah, and what do you know about it?
Well, first of all, the presence of lead in your telephone line really is very unusual
unless you're in a heavily rural area, because lead sheathing in your trunk line was usually
only used in areas where they were affected by moles tunneling into the conduits and attempting
to eat the early sheathing materials, which apparently they found very, very tasty, and
eat the copper wires inside.
These days, with the possible exception of very, very long distance fiber lines, the
tendency is that lines are laid in concrete or steel-lined conduits to address that.
So yeah, I think you're absolutely right as far as the diversity of methods to transport
lines around.
And I think for our area, there's a really diverse mix of older and newer stuff.
It may not be that ... I think there's a lot of aerial stuff, and I think they're perhaps
not lines encased in lead, but it's very old infrastructure that may be damaged and has
vinyl coverings, things that have been added to them over the years.
I've seen a mole or two.
I've seen a couple.
I've seen what moles do.
They dig holes.
Well, with aerial lines, especially in an older rural area, it's actually much more
likely, especially in the New York area, which both you and I are in as far as I know.
The tendency actually was that depending on when those lines were laid, they may have
actually been made out of aluminum, which was very common during certain periods around
World War I and World War II, because copper was far too important in the production of
munitions.
I see.
So would those then be susceptible to cracking and so on?
Because I'm pretty sure they're not like UV.
They were much more vulnerable to cracking.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not like black UV PVC coated stuff like the more modern trunks.
Early vinyl or rubber-based coatings are much more likely to crack, especially older stuff.
The methods used for sealing the splice points and the joints where they joined two cables
or where they joined a cable to a punchdown terminal or something is much more susceptible
to cracking or other wear.
Well, we're going to have to leave that here because we are out of time, but we're going
to continue pursuing that and trying to find out what the whole mystery is.
I think that what we were trying to focus on, though, was the lack of accountability,
and that's something that we want to hold Verizon to and see if we actually get some
satisfaction.
Thanks for that information.
Thanks, everybody who called in.
Sorry to those we didn't get to.
We will be hopefully back next week.
You can write to us, oth at 2600.com, with your feedback.
Until then, this is, until next week, that is, this is Emanuel Goldstein for Off The Hook.
Stay tuned for The Personal Computer Show here on WBAI.
Good night.
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go,
They can't touch me We break off, run so fast
They can't even catch me In that Jupice, touch me
I show you tricks From my six I quickly
Pick up the packs On my journey
Dogs from the stars Follow me
And my locks Some days they suck
When we live by the buck We go out for the family
One day I wanna be a star One day get to hanging in a bar
I go to Vegas at the payers Just to forget my scars
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, unveiled
Sweat shops have made me shifty
Like an indoor speed, I'm nifty
I hope I live till I'm fifty
See my city go like witty to pretty
I love my city, I believe in it