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The meeting starts at 7 p.m.
The public is welcome.
And this is radio station WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, 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.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you tonight, joined by Mike.
Hi there.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Annoying high pitch.
Do you guys hear that annoying high pitch?
Yeah.
Where is that coming from?
I don't know, but I received a text message about it too, so that's how annoying it is.
Wow.
Okay.
So, let me see if I can diagnose this problem.
It's coming from my microphone.
How about that?
Because if I turn my microphone down, you don't hear it anymore.
You hear it a little bit, actually.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Well, folks, I don't think there's anything we can do about this annoying high pitched
whine.
Just, you know, couple it with my voice, and now you have two annoying high pitched whines.
How about that?
Also joining us on the phone from Seattle is Kyle.
And, wow, the high pitched whine got even louder.
Hi.
I am here.
I can hear you.
I also hear the high pitched whine.
It's probably going to be the most popular part of the show, but we'll just have to deal
with it.
Well, I'm talking to you live from one of the great hacker capitals of the West Coast.
That being Seattle.
It's a very sunny day here.
Uh-huh.
Very hot.
Yeah, that's cool.
And for those people wondering, we will be patching Bernie in later.
We don't really, at the moment, have the ability to patch two people in.
God knows what kinds of crazy sounds we'll have if we try that.
And we also don't have the ability to take phone calls yet.
But I just confronted our general manager in the hallway, and it's narrow enough where
he couldn't pass unless he answered my question.
And he said the phone lines will be installed fairly soon, so we will be able to hear the
cheery voices of our listeners in the not too distant future.
I look forward to that and to getting rid of this whine.
Yeah, well, maybe one of you can go fetch an engineer or something that might understand
what the high-pitched whine is all about.
I don't want to keep the high-pitched whine for the entire show.
I'd rather not do that.
What I would like to do, though, is go over a couple of stories that have been in the
news lately.
And, Kyle, you're welcome to stay on for as long as you wish.
Well, not for the whole hour, because we're going to bring Bernie in.
I'm just doing some bills here.
It sounds like you're shredding something.
No, well, I have to catch up on my finances and everything.
Well, that's one way to catch up on them, I suppose.
Okay, so we have this story here, which I think is kind of a fun one to start off with.
Okay, if I turn him down, the whine gets a little better.
Wow, this is annoying.
The top six dumbest hacks of all time.
Oh, Reggie's here.
Reggie, do you know about this high-pitched whine?
Okay, Reggie's here to try and fix the high-pitched whine while I continue speaking.
The top six dumbest hacks of all time, as reported in TechWorm, with advanced technology,
high-speed internet, and availability of much more technologically advanced gadgets, it
has helped hackers to get basic and easy access to our personal and confidential credentials,
be it bank accounts or access to social networking sites.
Keep in mind, this is not me speaking.
The demonization of hackers is just unbelievable.
We'll have some more about that in just a little bit.
Normally, people are as scared of these cyber crooks and hackers as these people are believed
to be extraordinarily smart.
Hey, you got rid of the high-pitched whine.
How'd you do that?
I don't know.
Okay, for future reference, we just call Reggie in and he'll fix it, but he doesn't know how.
Okay, that's good.
I'm like Fonzie.
Okay, thank you.
This is why we have talented people around here that can fix things, and other people
around here who break things.
Okay, so anyway, this is kind of an outline of some of the dumbest hacks of all time.
I take exception with a few of them.
Four years back, in 2011, a dumb hacker hacked Kelly Osborne's email account.
She's the one from Dancing with the Stars.
The hacker not only traced her old and new emails, but also forwarded them to his own
personal email account, which could be easily traced.
This is considered to be one of the world's dumbest hacking incidents, which indicates
that the hacker was so dumb that by forwarding the emails to his personal account, he actually
invited police to trace and arrest him.
Well, you know what?
Maybe he wasn't trying to hide all that much.
Before we start pointing fingers and calling people dumb, I should point out that you spelled
the word incidence, I-N-C-I-D-E-N-C-E, instead of N-T-S.
It is a word.
It's just the wrong word.
It's the wrong word.
A spell checker would not catch that, and obviously that's what you relied upon.
Okay, then we have self-proclaimed hacktivist Shahi Mirza.
Way back in 2008, a group of people defaced a military website of Bangladesh government,
which is known as Rapid Action Battalion, RAB.
The website was www.rab.gov.bd.
It was sabotaged, forced to temporarily shut down.
Moreover, when people entered the site, the elite security site, they found a message
posted which stated, hacked by Shahi Mirza.
Mirza, a 21-year-old student of the Institute of Management and Technology, pled guilty
and was told the authorities he did not have any ill intent in hacking the site.
The authorities were able to retrieve the site after about 24 hours.
It was also found that he had earlier hacked the websites of 22 organizations, including
one that belonged to the army.
Obviously, that was not a—and they make fun of the spelling of something that was
put on the hacked webpage.
He spelled genius wrong.
The author of this article is spelling words wrong left and right, so yeah, okay, fine.
Making fun of him for that and also for the fact that he got caught.
This is the thing.
When sites are hacked, it's not always hacking that's behind it in the first place.
Sometimes it's just running a script and doing something really simple.
But being caught does not indicate that you're dumb.
Being caught just indicates you're not a good criminal and that you might not know
how to cover your tracks, but you still could have done an extremely clever thing.
You might see this article floating around, six dumbest hacks of all time, and they're
really—they're not that dumb.
I want to know who voted for the six dumbest hacks of all time.
I mean, I certainly didn't get a ballot myself.
I don't know if you guys did, but whatever consensus this is, I think I might question
their methods.
Well, this came from some security expert named Alan Wiesuk, and that's all I know.
So I just figured that might be an amusing thing to focus on for a moment.
Also, the U.S. Army said Monday temporarily took down its website after a group calling
itself the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the site and posted messages.
The Army said in the statement that hackers compromised an element of the army.mil service
provider's content.
After this came to our attention, the Army took appropriate preventive measures to ensure
there was no breach of Army data by taking down the entire website.
A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the hack and
said it left messages on the U.S. Army website, including one saying,
Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die fighting.
That's kind of confusing.
It's not that confusing.
Your commanders admit, that's just a lot of words.
Your commanders admit they are training the people they have sent you to die.
Who they have sent, I would say.
Yeah, okay.
But it's a non-native speaker and it's fine.
A copy editor could have made that a little better, I think.
Well, obviously the Syrian Electronic Army, to the extent they exist, doesn't have a copy editor.
And, you know, we're taking their word for it that the Syrian Electronic Army, some people
are saying, oh, you know what, there's a bunch of bored Russian kids now.
When a website gets hacked, it could be anybody doing it, and just because you put a name
on it doesn't mean that's necessarily the person behind it.
I just like the military tactics of, if a part of a website is hacked, then you take
down the entire website and, you know, I'm just glad they stopped short of taking off
and nuking the entire internet from orbit, just to be sure.
I mean, I wish they had just shut down the entire military as an extra precaution.
But I guess that's not so likely.
I think you need to hack more than one website for that.
Okay.
Hey, Kyle, anything from you out there before we connect Bernie in?
Oh, no, I'm just, I've been listening along here.
I think the dumbest hacks are yet to be seen.
And they're also all around us.
Are we working on something?
The dumbest hacks are yet to be seen.
Yeah, I suppose there's some truth to that.
There's never a shortage.
Okay, one final story, then we're going to switch over to Bernie.
And this is something I believe, Rob, you found this story.
Australian academics who teach mathematics may need to run new ideas
by the Department of Defense before sharing them or risk imprisonment.
Yeah, this is kind of crazy.
Some academics are set to become much more familiar with the Department's
Defense Export Control Office, known as DECO.
They're a unit that enforces the Defense Trade Control Act,
known as DTCA, of 2012.
Until recently, DECO only regulated physically exported weapons
and so-called dual-use items such as encryption, computing hardware,
and biological matter.
But in March, the act was updated to include intangible supply,
which is intended to prohibit the transfer of knowledge from Australia
that could be used to produce weapons.
What does that mean? Knowledge from Australia?
First of all, who contacts Australia when they want to know how to make a weapon?
I mean, no offense, I'm just, there's plenty of sources.
You know, pop culture has taught me that Australians know what is and isn't a knife.
So going from there, I think the country must have some sort of weapons expertise.
This story was sent to us by a friend of mine, an Australian teacher
called Nathan, who's a listener to the show.
And he actually suggests that maybe we go back to the DECSS days
of illegal t-shirts and so on, just to see if we can somehow get this
restricted Australian knowledge out into the world.
I mean, you edited the headline when you read it, because it's Australian English,
so it says, our math teacher is Australia's newest threat in the Australian press.
And I wonder if they should just... Maths, plural, maths.
Yeah, yeah. It's a hard word to say.
So I think they should just limit themselves to one math at a time,
maybe to reduce the threat.
You have a problem with polymaths?
Yeah. Maybe the Australian government does too.
That's all I got is making fun of Australian English.
What exactly could theoretically be included in this?
So a lot of modern crypto, all modern crypto is based on number theory
and other branches of mathematics.
And so if you are doing research into number theory or into anything else
that could one day be used for encryption,
then it is possible that the DECO could try and get you to stop.
And this is going to force, if actually enforced,
and who knows what will happen, but this is going to force
people who want to do this kind of work to not live or publish in Australia,
which is really pretty foolish of the Australian government,
in my view, but obviously I wasn't consulted.
Yeah, they're maintaining something called the Defence Strategic Goods List,
or DSGL, and that's the list of, I guess,
things that are particularly scary that you don't want to get out of the country.
And among the technologies covered by this are the 512-bit key length
of the RSA algorithm, which those of us who were around in the 1990s
might remember the days when the US government tried to restrict
the export of high-strength encryption and decryption tools.
We had things like web browsers that had to have a weak and a strong version
in order for it to be allowed to be put up for international download.
And eventually the United States government did realise
that this was kind of ridiculous, but here we are 20 years later
and the Australian government seems to be taking up the idea.
And how has it been received online?
I think it's been, well, it's certainly had a couple of laughs.
I don't know if there's any other sort of organised response to it going on.
I think there's quite a bit of discussion going on about this.
I can't imagine them being able to successfully prosecute anybody
for this kind of a thing. And I don't know who comes up with these ideas.
They know they're going to be just completely dissected and ridiculed.
They don't know, that's the thing.
How do they not know this?
They don't know.
They don't think about, they don't care about the public domain.
They don't care about people discussing things in public.
They just hear the word encryption, they think that a bad person could use it.
And they're like, oh, we've got to cut down on it.
And they don't know what they're doing.
I really don't think it's malice so much as incompetence.
There's certainly been a response to this by experts in the field.
This article quotes a few of them, including America's own Bruce Schneier,
who most people in this field know and love.
And what he says is,
what is likely to happen is that Australia becomes isolated
as the research and the researchers move elsewhere.
No one wants to work somewhere where there's totalitarian-like controls on thought.
Which I think is a good thought.
Interesting.
Okay, well, that's the latest from Australia.
Actually, before we let Kyle go, one more story I just want to focus on.
There's no other word for it.
It's a shameful story that appeared in Wired a couple of days ago.
The headline screams,
hacker can send fatal dose to hospital drug pumps.
My God, this is Wired for God's sake.
You know, you'd think maybe they have a clue technologically.
But this just screams of the New York Post or something.
The story begins.
We'll just read a little bit of it because that's all I think any of us can stomach.
When security researcher Billy Rios reported earlier this year
that he'd found vulnerabilities in a popular drug infusion pump
that would allow a hacker to raise the dosage limit on medication
delivered to patients, there was little cause for concern.
Because obviously it was only a hacker that could do this, not anyone else.
Altering the allowable limits of a particular drug simply meant
that if a caregiver accidentally instructed the pump to give
too high or too low a dosage, the pump wouldn't issue an alert.
This seemed much less alarming than if the pumps had vulnerabilities
that would allow a hacker to actually alter the dosage itself.
Now Rios says he's found the more serious vulnerabilities
in several models of pumps made by the same manufacturer
which would allow a hacker to surreptitiously and remotely
change the amount of drugs administered to a patient.
Basically, the story goes, it's an interesting revelation.
But to basically frame it this way, where a hacker is the only person
that would do this, hackers are dangerous, hackers will kill you,
I expect better from a magazine like Wired.
I really do.
And I just wonder, what were they thinking?
How would you guys say this? How would you phrase these paragraphs?
I would say maybe medical equipment manufacturer releases
products with vulnerability.
Again, a lot of words there.
That might not get in so many ad clicks.
Yeah, you need to get the ad clicks. I admit it, you need to do that.
But is basically getting people scared to death over hackers the only way to do that?
I think this is fine.
You think this is fine?
I think this is how the word hacker has come to be used
and words mean what people use them to mean.
So hacker is a criminal.
I think that is one meaning of the word that is the one they're using here.
That is the meaning of the word.
How can there be another meaning when you have something like this?
Lots of words have more than one meaning.
Yeah, but when you describe somebody in such an evil context...
I would say that the guy, what was the guy's name in the first paragraph?
Billy Rios.
Billy Rios, I think, is a hacker in the most positive sense.
He explored this product and figured out the vulnerabilities in it
and how he is concerned that hackers in a more negative sense
are going to take advantage of these vulnerabilities.
Okay, but there are words.
There are words to describe people that do things that are crimes.
Yeah, and this is one of them.
Why not say human?
I mean, it's as general as that.
Allow a human to raise a dosage limit.
I mean, yeah, the word has many meanings,
but good and bad.
But this, from a magazine that supposedly serves this community,
it's shameful.
If you want to use hacker in the headline,
we could use it to refer to this person who's bringing up this knowledge.
How about hacker discovers this in the first place?
Because he's probably a hacker himself.
Hacker could pump you full of drugs but chooses not to.
Kyle, any thoughts from Seattle before we let you go?
Well, I think it's really standard now to sensationalize
anything that is involved with technology
because it's really sexy.
It's in vogue.
People are using apps now
and so are their parents
and so, you know,
these news stories come up.
It gets people's attention
and it sells, I don't know,
maybe some sort of paper or magazine
or something like that.
But it gets people up in arms.
But overall, I think it's just a larger trend
of fits and spurts.
And that goes for the previous story, too.
I mean, maybe he realized that
the medical pump
but maybe he worked for
one of these
state correctional people
and they're trying to figure out
how they can administer
medicines or something.
And it was just another day on the job for him
and he just accidentally talked about it or something.
But the other thing, too,
I mean, I think
with exports of encryption
Americans don't realize how much
how lucky we are
to be able to use some of the technology
that isn't allowed in other parts of the world.
But I also am
not so naive to think that
those places are going to come up
with their own technologies.
And I think creating weapons
and knowledge around physics
and that sort of stuff
is a little bit different
than encryption as far as
communications and privacy
and information.
Let's look at the issue of
surveillance, another hot topic.
And I always see
in the tabloids
that the big threat comes from
hackers. Hackers can listen in on your
phone calls. Hackers can do this.
And we know damn well it's the government doing it.
It's corporations abusing your privacy
and neglecting your security.
Yet it always gets pointed out
because hackers are the ones who explain
it, who figure it out, who expose it.
This is doing the same thing.
It's basically saying that
hackers are the threat, hackers are the ones to be afraid of.
It has a very negative
effect on our entire community because
if you call yourself a hacker, all of a sudden
you're suspicious, you're evil,
you have no morals whatsoever
because of characterizations like this.
And it also hurts
people who think that, oh, well there's no hackers around
I guess I'm safe.
The fact of the matter is, with this particular story,
a hacker could change
the dosage of drugs delivered to patients.
Anybody can do this.
The story is that there is
no security, no
good security to prevent this sort of thing
from happening. That is what
should be focused on.
It just really rubbed me the wrong way.
I mean, I
hope and expect that the manufacturers of
these devices will fix their problems
so that actual
malicious people do not exploit these vulnerabilities.
Malicious people? What are those?
Malicious people? Wow, you just came up with a new phrase
to describe malicious people. You didn't use
the word hackers. I'm impressed.
That's good. English is a very flexible
language. It is. Lots of words have more than one
meaning, lots of concepts have more than one way
to say them.
Very true. And I think we should
try and teach Riot how to do that
and use different words than hackers.
Kyle, any last words from you?
Because we're going to switch over to Bernie on the East Coast.
I've got lots of
words, but last words
on that, I would just say that
we should be mindful
of the machines that we're
entrusting our lives to if you're
using these kinds of pumps.
It's something to be aware
of. That thing could be out of
your control. There could be safeguards
and mechanisms where
other people could take control.
That's a euphemism
for so many things
we see and
experience every day.
Tell other people about it too.
That's about all I'll say there.
I'm also
kind of
inspired. There's lots in your own
life. It's not just
hacking systems and things around you.
You can hack your own life, your own perspective
easily
from the comfort of your
hammock or wherever you
do your hacking.
I think that's the crux of
the discussion
over jargon
and terminology and
the media.
That's it. That's the only
distinction I can think of.
What I'm going to do with this article,
I'm going to change every instance of the word
hacker to librarian
because the story still is just
as true. This would allow
a librarian to raise the dosage limit
on medication delivered to patients.
Yes.
Sorry, I almost said the wrong word
again. A librarian could surreptitiously and remotely
change the amount of drugs administered to a patient.
The point is a librarian
could do this, but they do other things too.
It's just completely
ridiculous to characterize people in this way.
Hey, Kyle, we're going to let you go.
Good hearing from you.
Hope to see you again
in our new studios that are still
being built.
We're going to try and connect with Bernie.
Thanks for letting me
chat. I'm excited.
I've been hearing little reports and updates,
rumors, if you will, that there's
progress. If you listen carefully, you can hear
hammering.
Oh, wait.
People are building things.
Oh, wait. Somebody locked
in the bathroom. I'm not sure which it is, but one
of those things.
Excellent.
I think Kyle's building something out there too.
Good hearing from you.
We're going to try and raise Bernie now.
That's going to take all my concentration.
You guys carry it for a little bit.
We will do. While we have a story
that's relevant to our fellow librarians
and hackers and all sorts of other
creepy characters, this comes from Wireless Week.
It's a story about
FCC rebooting the Lifeline program.
Some of you may know about the Lifeline
program, which apparently has
been around for 30 years, but hasn't actually
accomplished much. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler
today announced a series of proposals he hopes
will reboot Lifeline.
And the word
reboot is in quotes, because that's what we do with those.
Among the proposals that
the FCC will seek comment on is a new set of
minimum service standards, Lifeline being
a program designed to make communications access
affordable for low-income Americans.
They're looking to increase competition
on price and service offerings.
Wheeler says the new proposals built on
2012 Lifeline reforms built to
crack down on fraud and waste,
because when you're providing service
to the low-income and the unfortunate,
you really have to crack down on all that
fraud and waste involved in this process.
Wheeler's primary focus...
Wait, wait, wait. I'm sure there's plenty
of fraud and waste in this process.
I doubt very much of it is coming from
the users of the program, but I am
sure that there is some fraud and some waste
to be found. Well, this is already coming from
Tom Wheeler. Yeah, right there.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler,
who is probably the most trustworthy figure
that we've ever
lied entirely about like that.
He says, because low-income
consumers disproportionately use smartphones for
Internet access, this puts them at a disadvantage at a
time when broadband access is essential
for access to education and information,
for managing and receiving health care, for daily tasks like
accessing government services, checking bank balances,
finding bargains on goods and services, and more.
Wheeler said this in a prepared
statement.
Of course, other countries... I remember
seeing this in the news a couple of years back when Finland
decided that broadband was a civil right
that citizens should
have access to.
I'm sure the providers
who have to actually
put up the equipment for these feel differently.
Sprint says upfront costs pose
a significant barrier to the target customers of the
Lifeline deal. The carrier suggested future versions of
Lifeline mobile broadband offers
include a subsidy for hardware
because they don't want to pay for things.
I mean, that sounds reasonable.
I mean, look, more and more
stuff is online. People
need to get online. Not everyone can afford
commercial rates to do so.
This program seems reasonable. I don't know the
specifics of the proposal to know if
those are reasonable or not, but the direction
I think is the right one.
Giving people a subsidy
to have, you know, landline
phones and 100 minutes of long distance calls
a month or whatever the old plan is
is not what people need
anymore, or not what everyone needs anyway.
And so it is spoken.
Okay, and joining us
now from Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Greetings
from Philadelphia. I'm a little nervous,
Emmanuel, if you hear my voice.
A U.S. military
helicopter is circling at low
altitude around my
home. Oh, it arrived. You know, that's just a
little surprise package from us.
Let the guys in, and they'll
have something for you. It looks like a
UH-60 Blackhawk.
In any case, I have no idea
what they're doing. I've never seen this before, circling
so low. But anyway, hey, I have a nomination
for the dumbest hack
and the smartest hack. Okay, let's hear it.
The
dumbest hack, or the whole lot of them,
is that people manage to
take over
a website, and they
totally squander and waste the opportunity
by posting something really stupid.
When you have such a global audience
of a well-
trafficked website, wouldn't
it be more useful to post something
that's really going to make a difference
or make a real point instead of
some silliness? How many times has this happened?
That's very
true. It's like the equivalent to graffiti you see in
the real world. There are some really clever things written
and really clever pieces of artwork
done in the form of graffiti,
but there are also a lot of people that are just writing their stupid name
and doing nothing else. It's rare that
you have someone who's politically
aware, someone who follows world events,
and somebody with technological
skills, together in
the same room at the same time, or in the same body
at the same time, who's able to
say something intelligent when they get that kind
of... It's kind of like elected office
too, you know? You have people that are good at
getting elected, but then when it comes to
actually doing something intelligent, it's a different
skill set, you know?
Yep. On the smartest
hack, go ahead.
The smartest hack, I think, was
something you were referring to earlier tonight
when Rob was referring to
when reasonably strong
encryption was considered ammunition in
the United States, and we couldn't export
PGP without
risking being charged with
a felony or worse.
So the clever hack, which some of us
in the hacker community remember, is that
someone printed
all the
code for
PGP
on paper, and then
sold it overseas, which was completely
illegal because it was printed.
It was First Amendment thing. It was on a printed page.
And then it was
retyped at a hacker
conference. I think that was in Germany.
And then it was legally
exported, and then the cat was legally
out of the bag. It was already out of the bag anyway,
but... They really typed it? They didn't
scan it?
I think it was scanned, but
it was hand-read and hand-verified
because they had to verify that
checksums and all that.
There were human eyes involved
in verifying that it was properly inputted.
I think it was a combination of human eyes and
OCRing. But I thought that was a really
clever hack. They got around a restriction,
and it had a
really good end in that the U.S.
government gave up trying to
criminalize the export of
PGP. Well, I mean, I don't know if you can credit
the people who mailed it with
that being overturned, but
it's more of a symbolic act to just show how
ridiculous such rules are.
And for that, yes, I agree. It is a very smart thing.
The same thing happened with
the good old DECSS code when
people weren't allowed to put the code online.
So some very clever people
sang it in songs instead or drew it in
illustrations or all sorts of other
things that were getting the information
across without falling afoul of the relevant text.
The point is to always challenge
ridiculous laws. Like when we were being sued
for DECSS, we took
it off our website, but we continued to have
links to other websites. They told us we weren't
allowed to have links, so then we got rid of the links
and just printed a list. And then that's
when they stopped telling us not to do things
because they realized this is going to go
to a bad place that we can't control because after
the list, we were ready to just have it in
conversational text and
basically the end result would have been to
tell us to just shut up and not talk anymore
at all. And fortunately,
it didn't get that far. We lost the case,
but we wound up educating a lot of
people, which was pretty good. Hey, Bernie,
this story is actually
a week old and there's an
update to it today, but I wanted to focus
on it a little bit because it's so
absurd and crazy, just
the way it was
being addressed. It has to do with the
train crash that took place down there.
Members of Congress
last week were pointedly
questioning federal rail investigators
over why they still didn't know whether the
engineer operating the train was using a
cell phone when it crashed on May 12th.
Three weeks later, I just don't understand what
the holdup is, said Representative Barbara
Comstock of Virginia.
It was the first congressional hearing into the derailment.
According to lawmakers, I'm sorry,
adding to lawmakers' frustration, was
that the National Transportation Safety Board
has access to the engineer's
cell phone and password, but
has not nailed down an answer.
It seems, said Representative Lee
Zeldin, if you get the access to the phone,
you look at the phone, you know the answer in like five
minutes. We were surprised
by the complexity of it ourselves,
responded the Safety Board's chairman,
and we're experts at this.
Christopher Hart told the
House Transportation Committee that while
investigators know that the phone
was used on the day of the crash, the precise
timing of that use is not yet
clear because of discrepancies among various
sources of information.
He could not say whether the phone was on or off
at the time of the accident. The time
stamps on the phone's text and calls,
for example, are in different time zones.
The phone had a California number.
He said there are some discrepancies
between times on the phone and those
in cell phone company records.
You know,
first of all, the update, today it was
revealed that, in fact, the guy was not on the phone,
was not texting, but
prior to all that, there was all this
bafflement and mystery.
How hard is it
to figure out these discrepancies?
Time zones?
Okay, you know, your voicemail might say
California time, when you're actually
in East Coast time,
you add three hours,
you know? It's not that difficult.
Is this really something,
am I missing something, Bernie?
No, I think it should have been
pretty easy to determine this. I think any reasonable
investigator could have, a reasonably smart
investigator could have figured this out
in less than an hour,
given access to the data. But what you said
just now isn't exactly true.
The National Transportation Safety Board
did announce today
something about the use of
this Amtrak engineer's phone,
but here's what it said. It said,
analysis of the phone records does not
indicate that any calls, texts, or data
usage occurred during the
time the engineer was
operating the train. Okay, that's good.
Earlier, I heard something earlier, I heard earlier in the radio
today, that she wasn't operating it in the
moments leading up to the accident.
So I thought that was kind of shady
when I heard that in the radio about an hour ago.
So, during the time the engineer was
operating the train, apparently he wasn't
operating the train when the accident happened.
It had been operating it.
Well, he was operating it, he was just
operating it wrong. He was increasing the speed instead
of decreasing the speed, which
would have been the right thing to do. But there's also
speculation that people were
firing projectiles at trains. In fact, there were three
other trains that were hit by projectiles in that very
area, and it's possible the guy was simply
stunned by something
and wasn't able to
do what he was supposed to do for
a few seconds, and that was enough. That's the
speculation. But he was accelerating for quite a while
up to the sharp curve.
So it'll be interesting to see how this all pans
out, but there's a lot of information that we haven't seen yet.
I mean, we don't know what happened
yet, and it sounds like some
investigators are looking, and maybe we'll find out.
But I do
note the tendency here
for the people in Congress to just instantly
point the finger at this guy who
is just some guy.
We need systems that are more
resilient than this one guy
making an error that it turns out he didn't even
make.
And it's a real convenient
excuse, I think, for some of these forces who
wish not to invest in the infrastructure
that would actually be safe and resilient to
some of these errors to say, oh, well, if this just
guy hadn't done this one thing, I
think we have to be a little bit careful of falling
into that trap.
What's the technology called?
The so-called positive train control.
Positive train control.
It was installed on the southbound tracks, but not the northbound
tracks, and apparently it has
something to do with ham radio frequencies.
They were supposed to go out and obtain ham radio
frequencies after Congress told them
they had to do this. Do you know anything about that, Bernie?
They weren't frequency
— it wasn't frequency spectrum that had been allocated
to the amateur radio service. It was different
frequencies. But I think that's a red
herring. That wasn't
really the holdup. I think there were other
implementation issues that were
serious. It's funny. All these big companies
are always clamoring for more
spectrum. We need more spectrum. We need more
spectrum. They should use what they have
more effectively. They already have spectrum that they
can use for this kind of stuff. But it's
kind of a ruse, I think.
That was one of the reports I read was that
they didn't have access. They had to negotiate
to buy spectrum.
It just seems that if Congress is serious
about having these rules put in place,
you don't just throw it to Amtrak
and say, get this done and
jump through all these hoops. You jump through
the hoops, you make sure it happens because
they've got a train network to run
and they should be, as Mike said, investing
in the infrastructure and making it
better, making it actually maybe high
speed one day. There are people in the Congress
who it fits their political
narrative for shared infrastructure
like Amtrak to fail so that they
can then privatize it and build
roads which they somehow believe are not shared
infrastructure and all this
stuff. So we
have to be careful when they try and point
fingers if
the people they're pointing the fingers at actually
have the power to make the difference or if they've been
denied that power and then get blamed anyway.
One thing that I think
a lot of members of Congress don't seem to realize
is that you can have both. Kyle and I were driving
around in Germany in a rental car. We noticed
a lot of people drive in Germany
and a lot of people take trains in Germany and they
both prosper. They both are well maintained.
They both go really fast.
You don't have to choose between one
or the other and they're very simplistic people
in Congress that seem to think that if they
do something positive for trains,
they're hurting their beloved auto industry.
In order to do
that though, you have to invest in both and that is
something that the Republicans
in particular but also a lot of Democrats are not
interested in doing. Right. Well, hopefully that
discussion continues as a result of
that tragedy. Barney, anything else
on that before we move on?
Not about the Amtrak incident that happened here in Philadelphia,
but it's a serious
tragedy. I think like eight people
died and this can,
I think it's less likely
to happen now just because
they're going to be paying more attention.
We'll just see. Yeah, but you know,
now we're afraid of fast trains.
If you go fast, you might, something
bad might happen and
it's just the way we think sometimes is astounding.
Okay, there is
word
from one of our listeners and we looked into this and found a
story of
those fake mobile towers.
They're popping up now in England.
Stingray boxes.
Fake mobile towers that scoop up data from
passing phones. They're routinely being used in
London. That's according to an investigation
by Sky News. Working
with German security company GMSK
Cryptophone, it
claims to have uncovered direct evidence.
The first in, those are Cryptophone people that we know?
Yeah. Oh wow, how about us? Our friends.
Barry, those people. Well,
good for them. I assume they're still involved
in the company, but it's the same company. Well, it wouldn't exist
if it wasn't for them, so wow.
They claim to have uncovered direct evidence.
Yeah, hackers have uncovered
evidence. Look at that. Wow.
I wonder how wired to write this story.
This is the first time in the UK this has
been noticed. At least 20 instances
of the use of these cell site
simulators.
They basically can be used to track
police suspects, but they can be used to track
anybody, really. Metropolitan
Police Service refused to confirm or deny
it was using them, so that probably means they were.
And all the data
captured by the investigation has been put in a Google
document, so now you know NSA has it.
Interesting.
Are we surprised by this?
No. The UK government
has really shown their
willingness and excitement to be ahead of the game
when it comes to building a surveillance state, so
if we know the US is doing something, the odds are pretty
high that the UK was doing it a couple years before.
I'm not surprised in the slightest.
Well, they say, according to
advocacy officer Matthew Rice,
he says, we can't be sure
that all these are used by law enforcement
agencies. They can be used by criminals
and are easily bought from the
internet for about £1,000.
Is that true? We can just buy a Stingray ourselves
for, what, $1,800?
I think with the exchange rates it's even
less. That's not a lot of money at all for a fake
cell site. Bernie, can you look into this?
I've seen
reports and I've seen
videos online of people demonstrating them at
US Hacker Conferences that could be put
together for about $1,500.
That would be about right, about £1,000.
If we have any particularly
generous listeners, I think at least one of our
birthdays must be coming up.
The Hope Conference will be coming up next year, so
that would be a fun thing to play with.
Of course, it's probably extremely
illegal, isn't it?
I'm sure there's somebody who would cry about it.
But it's not illegal if you're law enforcement.
So, maybe
if we somehow, between now and next year,
become law enforcement, we can do this.
But if I remember correctly, if we're using one of these,
we're not allowed to talk about it, so who would know?
Well, we're just talking theoretically.
Yes, of course.
Okay, what else we got? NSA's
hacker hunt has widened.
Yeah, without public notice or debate,
the Obama administration has expanded
the National Security Agency's warrantless
surveillance of Americans' international internet
traffic to search for evidence
of malicious computer hacking.
That's according to
verified NSA documents.
In mid-2012, Justice Department
lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting
the spy agency to begin hunting
on internet cables without a warrant
and on U.S. soil for
data linked to computer intrusions originating
abroad, including traffic that flows
to suspicious internet addresses
or contains malware.
The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor
only addresses and cyber signatures,
patterns associated with computer intrusions
that it could tie to foreign governments.
But the documents also note that
the NSA sought to target hackers
even when it could not establish
any links to foreign powers.
Again, hackers are the exception
and no doubt, because of stories like the Wired
story, they are seen
as the biggest threat to our
freedoms, and yeah, of course, if you're a hacker,
you don't have the same rights as other
Americans.
Seem right to you?
It seems interesting that we're poking
around at people that are
ostensibly outside American
jurisdiction and influence and
using that as an excuse to just
I'm sure they're capturing more than that
off of what they've got attached to things.
It's really a fascinating story.
I recommend people read the story
that ProPublica and The Times published
about it.
I mean, we shouldn't be surprised, of course.
Another example of NSA
overreach, but hey, another example
of NSA overreach, and it's really quite
something, this one. It's easier to tell the
public that foreign people are scary, I think.
Or hackers. Or hackers are
scary. And foreign hackers, forget about it.
The more you demonize hackers, the easier
it's like having
how prisoners have their rights
abused constantly, and
eventually, prisoners
and soldiers, eventually
those trickle down
into the populace, and we all
get to deal with being watched, being
analyzed, having all kinds of chemicals
fed into us
because it's
already been tried on this controlled population.
Well, now hackers, walking
around free at the moment,
are the evil group
of people that it's okay if you violate the rules
if you're catching a hacker.
The other thing that was shown in this investigation
is that the NSA
doesn't throw out data
once they collect it, so they make up an excuse
like, this data, we want it because
it's related to a hacker, and a hacker is of course
not a legally defined term,
so they can just make stuff up,
and then they collect the data, and then they have data
that they would not otherwise be
legally, even in their own view,
allowed to collect, and data on
Americans, which, if you believe
Americans deserve more privacy than
other people for some strange reason, then that's
a big shame, and so they have
this additional data, and then they can do whatever they want with it
because they have it, and they obtained
it by reasoning that in their self-contained
world is legal.
So we have the foreigners and the hackers
getting hold of our secret data, and
in the medicine pump story, they're also interfering
with our precious bodily fluids.
I, for one, am afraid of everything.
As well you should be.
Mission accomplished. That's what the media
does. Okay.
I wish we could take phone calls because
there's so much to talk about.
I want to hear what people are saying, but you know,
we have our email address, and you can
write to that email address, which is
oth at 2600.com
We cherish every
bit of email that comes in
and that we get to
read.
Even if it's critical.
I'm going to read a critical email
here because we do get a bunch of those as well, and
the more critics, the better, I think.
Keeps us on our toes. Oth at 2600.com
Let loose.
Use foul language if you have to, if that's the way you express yourself.
But we won't read that over the air.
Okay. Come on, guys. How are you
going to ask listeners for expert advice to help you
understand the story when, and here we go, all
caps, but I can't scream this loud. None of you
even bothered to watch the Gurkhan
video of Chris Roberts' presentation.
The video answers many of the questions
you asked each other and listeners. If you guys
aren't going to care about the accuracy of the news you
are reporting, asking listeners for information
already sent to you, I'm not going to care either.
Wow. This letter
comes from our listener, Angelo,
who we definitely rubbed the wrong way with
that story. Chris Roberts being the guy that
supposedly hacked an airplane
and claimed to have
flown it sideways or turned it
sideways. Here's the
problem I have with this letter.
It goes on for quite a bit. We'll read more
of it in a little bit after we have a chance to
catch our breath. You don't give
any information to correct us.
You tear us apart that we got it
wrong, but you don't tell us what
the right story is.
I mean, I think the
fundamental disagreement I have with
this letter's writer
is that the person
in the video who he's instructing
us to watch has shown himself
not to be the most reliable source
of information in the world. Oh, you did it again. You did it again.
You trashed the guy. And now we're going to get another
letter saying that you should have watched a video
before you said that.
But a video of him. Do you know what you said?
Do you know what you said? Because you have to think about
this now and you have to come back and say it back.
I'm not going to tell you what you said that was so offensive,
but if you do your research and watch a few videos
and read some books and come back next week,
maybe you will have learned something. But I'm not going to say anything.
If you don't care, I don't care either.
That's what I have a problem
with, is letters like that. Tell us what
we did wrong. Show us that we're wrong. Convince
us. This is not convincing.
I would like to see some
third-party sources
analysis of this guy's video, explaining
if his claims in the video,
we know the claims in the video, we don't know
if the claims in the video are correct or not, and
watching the video is not going to give us that
information. I have always, I'm returning to the letter
now, I have always defended Off The Hook as a
good news source. You are starting to be
more unreliable for accuracy. And here
we go, all caps again. ACCURACY
was the entire reason I started to listen to you in the first
place. You slammed Chris Roberts
as someone who was non-credible while
siding with large enterprises who have a very
strong business interest in covering this up.
No, we didn't. We simply reported
that, you know, there are people who doubt
this, that maybe the story
doesn't, a lot of it was theoretical. We
don't know. That's one thing I think
he said over and over again, we don't know the facts.
Continuing, you invited Chris Roberts to be
on your show to clear things up after completely
slamming him, oblivious to the fact that
Chris Roberts made a statement that he can no longer comment
on this story. Well, you know
what, when you can't comment on something involving
you, then people are going to speculate, and
I don't know how we're supposed to get around that.
But surely there are people who
are knowledgeable about this more than we are
because none of us are aviation experts, and
they can comment on the story. What we've
always tried to do on this show is not only report
the news, but discuss it,
throw things back and forth, and see how much more information
we can get on it. And
this is a case where, yeah, we asked our listeners
for help with that, as we always do, because
that's important to us, to get
all the info we can that's available,
and we're not going to catch everything. We don't know
everything. We don't even
know that much. The strength of the hacker community
has always been that we have such a diverse crowd
that can, you know, there will be someone who knows
more about this than we do and can maybe share that.
We may know of a video
that answers these questions.
You know, we either don't know about it, or we
don't have the time to go through and
look at all this. This is what conversation is for.
Here we have a couple of
paragraphs here where an opportunity was
given to tell us exactly what the story is,
and it's not there. Let's finish up the letter.
Good job, guys. And I think that's sarcastic.
So glad this was all done during a
fundraiser show. And thank you, everybody, who called
in for the fundraiser, made it a success.
I know you asked listeners to be
easy on you, but when did Off The Hook ever
take it easy on anyone else, calling out
the very same issues? Well, yeah, we are hard-asses
as far as that goes. Thanks, Angela, for the letter, though.
Really, seriously. And write us more
letters, critical and non-critical, and that
goes for everybody else as well. We do
love to get letters. And I do take issue
with what he said about us asking
listeners to go easy on us, because I
have never asked for that. You know, if we misspeak, let us
know about it.
Yeah, when did we ever ask listeners to go easy
on us? We've always been totally open to being
corrected and, in fact, appreciate it when it happens.
I even said before, go crazy. Use
obscenities. I said that. You can just
let loose, and don't spare
us any
thoughts whatsoever. Bernie, any
feedback from you on this?
Well, I agree with you guys on
this story. We don't
have enough information on this to verify
any of it is true.
Supposedly, the FBI is investigating,
and if he
really did any of this stuff, I am quite sure
he'll be charged with a crime, and probably
in short order. If he's not,
then I think it says something
about the guy's credibility.
Well, I mean, the story here, which a lot of us
seem to be forgetting, is that
if it's true, it means that there are severe
problems in the airline industry
that allow people to
tap in and control
the flight path or
the altitude or whatever that an airplane
currently is
embarked upon.
That is a huge story, regardless of who
did it or what they said.
If it's not true,
and I think this is kind of the thought process we had a few weeks
ago, if it's not true, then
the credibility is in
question here. If it is true, we need to be talking
about it. We need to be holding
the people, and this guy is not the one responsible,
the people designing the systems and hooking
them up so that this sort of a thing is possible.
They're the ones that need to be held
to account, and I'm not seeing a lot
of discussion about that. Yeah, if
it's true, the story's huge and should definitely be
reported further.
But it's open to, I think, further
examination right now, and the responsible thing to
do is to open ourselves up for
more information about it, but maybe
not shout it from the mountaintops as gospel just yet.
If such a thing is possible,
I think there's an obligation to expose
the information, because covering it up
is not going to protect any—it might protect us for a little
while, but somebody's going to figure it
out, and that somebody might not have the best
motives. And in
this particular case, if the person did
discover it, the first thing to
do would be to let everybody know,
and not just simply hint that you know about
this or make other kinds of
claims. If this is something that
you discover, that you stumble upon,
this kind of wide
open security hole, the best thing to do is to
let the world know. But of course,
be careful the channels you use,
because as we've seen,
authority figures, even
journalists, like to point the finger
right back at the person that discovered
the hole in the first place, rather than
talk about the security hole.
All right.
Here's another
story that I thought was kind of interesting
concerning prosecutors
in terror cases.
This is happening in Chicago.
A Chicago terrorism case. I'm not sure which
case that is.
Basically, the prosecutors
wanted a federal judge to
prohibit the defense from
mentioning the name Edward Snowden.
In this terrorism
case.
Of course, Edward Snowden is the person who
disclosed how
the courts were able to
secretly approve expanded
U.S. surveillance methods. Prosecutors
worry that the defense
could seek to blurt out Snowden's name
and related topics at the trial
in July. They say the defense
shouldn't be able, and this is a quote,
to encourage the jury to disregard the evidence
because of the means of
collection. Let's try to read between
the lines here. Are they saying that mentioning
Edward Snowden's name
will just bias the jury
into something? Well, this must be justified then
because Edward Snowden did such an
incredible thing for us.
What are they actually afraid of? Bernie, any
thoughts?
I think
the prosecutors are just afraid
that they can't make Edward Snowden
just disappear.
Have you noticed a trend that government authorities
are trying to disappear the name
and even the image
of Edward Snowden? Remember when there
was a bust of Edward Snowden installed in
Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn?
I don't know
if that's anything more complicated than
a bunch of parks employees
not liking someone putting up a statue
that wasn't approved.
I don't know if it's part of a big conspiracy.
They put a shroud over the
sculpture of Edward Snowden's
head before they removed it, and then they hid it
in a government storage facility. Okay, but you know what?
If we put the statue of you that we have in the
warehouse in the same park, I would bet
that same shroud would come out because they wouldn't know
why that was there.
I don't think they would have shrouded it the same way.
I just think they hit it with a sledgehammer.
Even if they were reacting to Edward Snowden,
I don't think it was in coordination
with prosecutors.
No.
It's a trend. It reminds me of the
Soviet government's practice of disappearing
the pictures and names of people from
textbooks and newspapers
and statutes and things.
It's like after somebody did something
that the party disapproved of.
And here it is happening in our own country.
I definitely don't think it's a big conspiracy
where the prosecutor working on the Edward Snowden
case called the New York City Parks Department
and said, you better cover this up immediately.
But I think what is being done
and has been done successfully is creating
this notion of Snowden and other
people like him as such dangerous figures
that the Parks Department people
using their own independent judgment
when they found out who this was a statue of
independently decided
oh, we better cover this up.
And I think you don't need a conspiracy
for behavior like that to emerge.
Well, I think, yeah, and I agree with that.
But I think it could have gone
no further than somebody saying, Edward Snowden,
oh, that's an evil person because
that's what I heard in the news. That's what
has been said and drilled into my head
over and over again. It's kind of
the same reaction that
we saw with people at the hotel
when we told them that we were going to have Edward Snowden
as our speaker. Oh, that guy
is bad. He's hurt the country's
defense. Just basically line
for line the talking points
that have been put out by certain political
figures and certain media outlets.
And again, I don't think this is a
coordinated thing. I think it's just the way
that it's been presented over
the years so that people have this view
that, yeah, this is an evil guy.
And it certainly does serve the government's
purpose to have people thinking this way.
So it's just, it's something
that, did they ever get the statue back, by the way?
I think they did. Did they? Okay. They did return
the statue to its rightful owners, but
by that I don't mean the public. I mean
the people who put it there. But
the fact that I think we have
some judge somewhere who, or
some prosecution somewhere, who thinks that
the merest utterance of the name Edward Snowden
is going to, like an incantation,
turn the trial against them.
I think that says a lot about not only
the power of what Edward Snowden
did, but the power of his place in history
now, where he's in the public
consciousness as a certain type of figure.
And it's a type
that frightens the powers that be. And I
think that's kind of interesting.
That tells me that
his name actually has a positive
effect on potential
jurors, as far as
protecting freedom. And that's what they don't want to do.
Well, actually, the full
greater Ed Snowden summoning ritual,
you have to stand in front of a mirror and say his name three times
and draw a chalk circle
on the floor and do some other stuff. But we don't have time
to get into that. No, we certainly don't.
And also, just to let people know, we are not on next
week. We'll be on in two weeks.
So there's a special program next week.
So you won't hear our cheery voices,
Dan, but maybe by the time we get back, we'll have
phone lines, we can take listener phone calls.
Before we go, though, I just wanted to touch upon the
massive data breach that involved
U.S.
government employees. Bernie, did you hear anything
about this? Oh, yeah.
Millions of... These weren't just
government employees. These were all people
apparently who had either
had high-level security
clearances or were applying to upgrade
them.
And millions of
people with security clearances
or who were applying for them
got their personal identifiable
information just taken
from an unsecure
government website. And millions
of people. This screams to me
as an actual espionage hack. This seems
like it was well-targeted against people
of high value to a foreign government.
And it was immediately blamed on China, and
they are kind of denying that.
Wait, wait, Bernie. There are 4 million people in
the United States who have a security clearance?
I'm not surprised by that. That's insane.
It is insane, but I'm not surprised by this
level of insanity. It's over a percent.
It is. Well, you know what?
You can probably hear a lot about this
in the mainstream media. That's why we didn't discuss
it too much, but we'll probably talk about it as the story
develops, and the story will
no doubt develop in
the weeks and months ahead. Again, our email
address, oth at 2600.com.
Again, we're not on next week. Personal Computer Show
follows us right now.
We'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Manual for Off the Hook. Have a good night.
Maniac.
But it did not affect
the state of his luck.
The state of his luck.
They took back Hollywood
with make-out bleeding
over the crack.
He blew his line
facing the camera.
He suffered the first
all-night heart attack.
Oh, what an
even battle
he had.
The motor
cyanide, cyanide's in his eye.
He finally found
the brick wall in his eye.
Shining up his engine.
He just rode up for it.
At the top of the speedo. Run for the
fight. There's plenty
people running, running for
cover. Hoping at
best, he's holding on for
one last stand.
At the Buc-A-Thon.
Machine gun.
And pitchfork
at breast.
Oh,
what an even
battle he had.
But it isn't so easy.
So easy for the man.
Came in last place. At the top
of the tower. The big
horse is leaving. At the
speed. Driving your
heart. Away with the
flowers. Oh, but I'll
live it. I'll fight for a horse
man. Friend is all I
faithful. He's Indian friend.
I'm not the only one.
Oh, they can't even say the fact.
I'm watching the sky.
For mankind's
friends.
Oh,
oh,
oh,