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It's time once again for Off the Hook.
I cut the law. I cut myself while shaving. Now I can't make a cop. We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would. Bon dilly bon for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bon dilly bon!
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, happy Wednesday.
Yes, happy Wednesday indeed. Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening. Happy New Year.
It's bigger. Okay. Happy New Year. Kyle. Here. All right then. And Bernie S. Greetings from Philadelphia.
Yes, it is a new year. 2016 is upon us and not really noticing much of a difference to be honest.
There's a lot more prime factors of the year than there were last year.
Prime factors, like how?
Like lots of twos, a seven, some threes.
I heard it said actually that if you really want to get into it, this is one of the few years that is divisible by every number or something like that.
It's divisible by two, by three, by four, by five.
Not by five.
Not by five. Yeah, that's right. It's divisible by, you know.
All the single digit numbers except five. It's true.
Well, when do we get a year where all the divisible numbers are, I guess, maybe.
In five-fourths of 2016.
Okay. That's my answer.
We'll have to figure it out at some point.
All right. Well, you know, there are momentous changes ahead in various ways.
And probably the one that shatters our world the most is the proposal to raise the Twitter limit from 140 characters to 10,000.
Any thoughts on this?
I'm about out of things to say on that.
Yeah, well, you know, I was listening to this actually on another show driving in.
And the whole thing with Twitter is that it was originally meant to fit onto your phone.
160 characters and they took 20 characters for themselves.
140 characters is pretty short.
10,000 characters is pretty long.
I think there might be room for something in between.
A lot of people, though, are taking, as the CEO has said, a lot of people are taking pictures of text and posting that to get around the 140 character limit.
I do think, though, it might help people write actual sentences and spell actual words.
I know, Mike, you don't think this is an issue.
But I can't help but notice that people are speaking Twitter more often than they're not when they're not using Twitter.
In other words, they don't seem to care how they spell words.
Basically, the spell check will catch everything.
So I don't need to know spelling.
I don't need to know grammar.
I don't need to know math.
You know, all that.
Hashtag spelling.
That's the kind of response you want, right?
I don't know what you even mean by that.
Hashtag spelling.
Hashtag spelling.
Hashtag spelling.
Is this like a meme or something?
I don't think. No, it's a hashtag.
It's a hashtag.
You can click on what I just said.
We're not speaking English.
And then you can learn all the things that other people have to say about spelling.
And if you spell spelling correctly or incorrectly, you'll probably get different answers.
Yeah, but if someone's talking about errant spelling, then I'm going to get that, too.
It's not really.
I don't know.
Kyle, any thoughts on raising the limit?
No.
Okay.
Well, you fit very well in the Twitterverse.
I can see that.
Bernie, how about you?
I'm not on the Twitterverse, but I think they should.
Why not just make it 10 million?
10 megabytes?
I mean, 10,000 is more than anybody's going to read.
Well, that's the thing.
You ever see the phrase T-L semicolon D-R?
That's the longest I think anyone has ever taken to say that phrase, but yeah.
Well, how can you say it faster?
You can skip the semicolon and just say T-L-D-R.
A lot of people have taken to skipping the semicolon now.
It means too long, didn't read.
And, you know, that annoys me somehow because you should take time to read things.
And, you know, if this results in less people posting inane nonsense, then great.
And if people read longer things, that's great too.
It's nice to have something quick, and I think we will always have something quick.
But I really, you know, I accidentally turned on the sitcom Seinfeld the other day.
Hadn't seen that since I think the 1990s.
And it was really weird.
The pace just seemed so slow.
And I know it didn't seem slow when I first watched it.
So something in me has changed over the past 15 or so years where I'm impatient.
Come on.
Somebody do something.
And I think this is happening in many aspects of our lives where the attention span has just really been minimized.
And if something doesn't happen quickly, you change the channel.
You go to another website.
You talk to a different person.
We don't really relish pauses and conversations and length as much as we used to.
I'm sorry I took so long saying that.
I know two people have left the room already, and the other is rolling his eyes.
It's just the nature of things these days.
And I don't know if Twitter lengthening its limit will address any of this or if something else will just pop up to replace it.
So I think the reason people are upset is that we have entered this situation where we have a communication tool that a lot of people, myself included, find incredibly valuable, often incredibly interesting.
But it's controlled by one company, and they can change the rules at will.
And I think that's what worries me.
This specific rule change I don't think is going to be doom.
But the fact that there's one company that controls so much and just a handful of companies in total that controls so much of our communication, that is, I think, what's worrying more than it's why we have to obsess about these tiny little things that really don't matter.
Don't we let these companies do this?
Can't another entity just come and start something better?
Twitter came out of nowhere, didn't it?
Yeah.
The barriers to entry are higher and higher because there's already a thing that does what Twitter does.
I don't think they'll be around forever.
Obviously something will come next.
But between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and just a few others, the amount of human-to-human communication that passes through very few gatekeepers is pretty high.
Yeah.
Rob, any thoughts?
Yeah.
It's funny watching this whole process happen because I remember making fun of Twitter when it came out just because, oh, I've already got a blog.
Why do people want to read shorter things?
But then I dove into Twitter and found it, as Mike said, incredibly useful for what it does.
And the reason it caught on, and I think the reason that it's still useful, is that you know you're getting little bits of things from the people you follow.
It's something that you can skim when you've got a minute or two rather than reading full-fledged blog posts from everyone you're following.
But we see so often like somebody will come out with something super specialized and it does something novel and it catches on because of that.
But then after just doing that, the entity controlling it decides they want more.
Like that's how you start the science fiction channel in the 1990s and nowadays it doesn't show science fiction and it changed its name and so on and so on.
So yeah, Twitter. I think Twitter, the company, wants to do more than what Twitter, the product, does.
And they want to see if they can catch more of the market by doing things that they're not good at.
Well, you did touch upon a point where things get dumbed down.
I've noticed this, especially you mentioned TV networks.
I've noticed that there were specialized networks years ago.
There was something called the Arts Channel, which merged with another channel and became Arts and Entertainment.
They showed ballet, they showed opera, they showed foreign films.
Bravo was much the same way.
There were all these specialized niches that were being served.
And gradually, gradually they all started to merge into the same dumbed-down content.
Well, you can't tell the difference anymore from one channel to another even though they supposedly serve different audiences.
Independent Film Channel, they don't show independent films.
The Science Fiction Channel doesn't show science fiction.
Why do we gravitate in this direction? Any theories?
Like I said, I think it's just the people controlling them decide,
okay, this little thing we've got, this specialized thing is doing okay, but we want more money from different people who we're not reaching.
But it's all the same.
Yeah, it all sort of homogenizes into the same general stream of crap that everyone's doing.
And that's how you have the Discovery Channel showing shows about ghosts.
Yeah, it's really pretty pathetic.
Getting back to Twitter, though, there have been some other changes with the new year.
Apparently, Twitter is changing the rules for what you are now allowed to tweet.
And this has caused a little bit of controversy.
Abusive behavior, once part of an abuse and spam section, has now been devoted the largest section of the rules.
It states, we do not tolerate behavior that crosses the line into abuse,
including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user's voice.
That sounds reasonable. Does it not?
Bernie, is this a step on your rights at all?
Oh, I don't care, because I'm not on Twitter.
No, I don't have a problem with that. It sounds reasonable.
But there's always going to be something we don't think about.
It's going to be hit us, and like, oh, they didn't think of this, and it's just some workaround or whatever.
Let's see what happens.
Well, you also cannot tweet hateful content. That's in quotes.
Which means, and this is a full quote here,
you cannot promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race,
ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease.
Does that include ISIS?
I'm sorry, what?
Does that include ISIS?
Well, that's an interesting question.
If you say, yeah, let's bomb these ISIS bastards back to the Stone Age,
sounds to me like, well, what is that?
It's not race. It's not ethnicity.
It doesn't really fall under any of this.
Religious affiliation, does it even fall under that?
I think they claim it's a religious...
I mean, they argue that they're for a religious caliphate.
So, you know, that's a religious belief, and a lot of people don't agree with that.
But they're claiming to be part of a religion that other people claim to be part of as well,
except they distort it in a way that makes it unrecognizable.
I'm thinking, if a country goes to war against another country,
which, you know, every few years we do that,
and somebody tweets that they want to bomb the... fill in the country name here,
seems to me that would violate this policy.
Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of countries, militaries,
that bomb people based on their nationality or geographic location or something like that.
And I don't expect that, you know, like the U.S. Army will be kicked off Twitter anytime soon.
Well, I mean, it seems like they should,
because if they're saying that they're going to be taking out targets in this particular country,
they're doing it because the people are in that country.
I mean, that's a threat right there.
Right. It's hateful conduct. It's based on national origin.
They're promoting violence because they're doing it themselves.
And, you know, they say you can't directly attack.
Well, you can't get more of a direct attack than that, you know, dropping bombs on people.
So it's kind of an interesting interpretation.
And we've already seen situations in which this could have been dangerous.
We all watched a few years ago when Egypt had a revolution,
and what was going on was heavily... it was heavily centered on things like Twitter
and the exchange of information about what was going on among the rebellion and among this and that.
And would any of that have fallen afoul of these rules, I think?
But we know now how historically important that all was.
Also, the definition of violence has been altered to include threatening or promoting terrorism.
Now, that's interesting, too, because, well, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist,
and everyone is always accusing everyone else of being a terrorist.
Are those folks in Oregon, are they terrorists? Are they domestic terrorists?
Environmental activists have been called domestic terrorists as well by governments.
By the U.S. government.
By the U.S. government.
So if you're promoting an action by Earth First or something, are you running afoul of Twitter's new rules?
I know it's not the most important thing in the world, being able to tweet or not tweet,
but it is a way, as many of us recognize, an effective way of reaching out to lots of people very quickly.
And there's a lot of power in this.
So when you start controlling speech, you have to look carefully at whether or not that's a good thing.
I mean, I think this stuff is really, really hard to get right, possibly impossible,
because, you know, there are people who are effectively denied access to Twitter
because they go on Twitter and tweet something innocuous,
especially if it's about feminism or something like that,
and get such a wave of harassment that they are effectively shut down.
So I don't want to give that sort of people the effective power to shut people down either.
It's really hard to get right. I don't know what Twitter should do here.
Well, there is a degree of self-governance that I think users can help by exposing people.
I mean, Anonymous does a great job of this, exposing people who are saying hateful things or doing hateful things.
And, you know, I have mixed feelings about public shaming, but sometimes it works.
Yeah, there's a certain presidential candidate right now whose name I won't say
because he's talked about far too much on the radio.
Well, you're going to love the story I have next.
But he tweets a lot of things that make sweeping statements about other people's religious affiliations
or geographic locations and things like that.
So would he get kicked off? I'd like to see that.
Well, you know, I'm sure in short order he would say something that would definitely qualify.
So that would be a very interesting test, and I think we should keep an eye on that particular Twitter account.
It is a slippery slope, though. Not a slippery slope.
But it is difficult to do this right because you could say freedom of speech
and everyone should be able to say what they want, and I agree with that.
But on the other hand, Twitter running this site, do they want whatever people are saying on their machines?
I run a blog, say, and people make comments saying something stupid.
I can delete that comment if I want because I don't want to be the showcase for that kind of thing.
It is their service. It is their hardware. They can do what they wish.
They can say you have to have proper grammar, and then I would cut it down quite a bit.
Right, but part of the power of the Internet is that anybody does have access to publish what they want
if they've got the chops to do it or they pay for the right service or whatever.
But Twitter, because it's such a centrally involved thing and it's so huge,
their corporate decisions have power over what people can say on a large scale.
I mean, you're clearly right in a legal sense.
Like, obviously, Twitter can do whatever they want,
but there's a difference between Twitter and your blog, as wonderful as your blog is,
a communication platform that millions of people use every day.
I think it's entirely fair for us to discuss what should they do.
Like, obviously, we can't make them do anything by any means other than getting off their service if we disagree.
But I think it's entirely fair to debate their policies,
and I wish I had a stronger opinion on their policies so that I could debate it more effectively.
But, you know, it's totally fair.
Well, it's another reason why there need to be alternatives,
and alternatives that we know about that we can point people towards.
I mean, there are versions of Twitter in different countries,
but in this particular country we have things like Instagram and other social networking tools,
but they're different. They're not quite the same thing.
However, with this 10,000 character thing,
Twitter's kind of moving in the direction of Facebook a little bit.
So I wonder how that's going to affect things.
I guess we'll find out.
I guess we will.
New World Hacking is the name of a supposed group of hackers.
They took credit for a major denial-of-service attack
that knocked the BBC offline for a few hours on New Year's Eve.
The hackers contacted the BBC's technology correspondent
and said they didn't mean to knock off their site.
The attack was only a test for their new DDoSing tool.
It was only a test, said owns, is the guy's or girl's name, OWNZ,
one of the New World Hacking team members.
We didn't exactly plan to take it down for multiple hours.
Our servers are quite strong.
The hackers said their new tool, called BangStressor,
was specifically designed by a U.S.-based hacktivist,
and they plan to use it against ISIS or Daesh or ISIL,
whatever you want to call them, against their particular servers.
It's going to be an interesting year, isn't it?
What will that do?
Well, it'll keep them—
So you shut down the BBC.
If you shut down the BBC's website,
you've actually shut down a large percentage of the BBC's ability to do things,
because what they do is disseminate information.
If you shut down the Islamic State's website or whatever,
they're still going to be able to behead people.
Well, and the BBC will still be able to broadcast programs.
I mean, they diversify, both of them.
Yeah, well.
Anyway, he also said the group formed in 2012 is made up of 12 hackers,
eight males, four females,
and they're only interested in attacking ISIS targets.
All of the group's members are based in the United States.
Boy, we found out a lot of information about them.
The group is supporting anonymous campaigns—
that's anonymous with a capital A—
but is not officially part of the Hacker Collective.
Not that you really can be officially part of the Hacker Collective in the first place.
They didn't get their stamp.
Didn't get the membership card, no.
Now, previously they participated in the Op KKK and Op Paris anonymous campaigns,
which exposed the real identities of Klan members
and shut down tens of thousands of ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts.
Now, also, there was an attack on Rob's favorite person, Donald Trump, yes,
following that remarkable New Year's Eve incident with the BBC.
New World Hacking, apparently, went after Donald Trump as well.
Main purpose of—actually, this is still the ISIS section here.
Yeah, citing a one-hour test, New World Hacking, a New York-based—
New York-based, nice.
We're zeroing in on them.
We're getting more information with every paragraph.
took responsibility for the disruption of Donald Trump's campaign website.
While bearing the brunt of the attack, an archived version of the website
was accessible during the outage, but the mobile version of the website
returned a message with a different take on high-volume traffic
that is routinely generated by DDoS attacks.
We're experiencing an unusually high volume of traffic at the moment.
We're honored that so many people want to show their support
to help, hashtag, make America great again.
The Twitter account of New World Hacking, highlighting their social media presence,
provided proof of the one-hour test after takedown with the following tweet,
DonaldTrump.com, tango down, New World Hacking, etc., etc.
They also claimed that the site that was up was simply a mirror in its place,
which I guess most people wouldn't have noticed if that was true.
But it's interesting that they're testing it out on these very popular websites.
I wonder what it's going to be like when they actually start to use their tools.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't approve of DDoSing a site and taking it down,
even when it's something I really don't agree with, like say Donald Trump.
But it's strange that they're attacking that and they're attacking the BBC,
which does upset me a bit because I love Doctor Who.
But yeah, whatever you're going to do to achieve something in life,
if it involves taking down someone else's site,
I don't know if you can really call that any kind of notable achievement.
So you knock their site down for a couple hours, big deal.
I think if you really are against Donald Trump, the best thing you could do is let him talk.
Because he's going to dig his own grave and take a bunch of people with him at the same time.
Exactly. I love the ability of the Internet to use the Internet to see
how full of crap the people I don't like are.
It's only cool if you use it as a distraction for all the other things you're doing to their terrible site.
Yeah, I guess you could cover up the real hacking that's going on.
Yeah, then it's cool.
Because taking over a website doesn't really involve much in the way of hacking.
It's simply running a few scripts. I mean, it depends how you do it, obviously.
There are some clever things you can do, but there's also a lot of predictability.
And that's why a simple denial-of-service attack really doesn't take any skill whatsoever.
That's why I've always felt strongly against that sort of thing.
That's why it's a good distraction.
Yeah, definitely. Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
You know, I hate to say this, but government takes down websites, too.
And sometimes for no good reason.
I think there was a story recently that Mike Coe was telling us about
where five years after the U.S. government took down a music website,
the guy finally got it back, but with no apology and a lot of expense.
Isn't that right, Mike?
Yeah. I think he had to also pay like $7 or $9.
Take me a second to pull up the story.
But yeah, $7 it cost.
After five years, the government took this website.
This guy had a website on smash.com.
It was a hip-hop blog.
And they thought it violated copyright, but I guess they couldn't prove their case.
The legal wranglings are a little bit hard for me to actually understand.
But the government just basically gave up and said,
you can have your website back now.
But obviously any audience that this guy had built up five years ago
has now disappeared and moved on.
So it's really weird.
Yeah, it is weird.
Also, you know, something that doesn't really serve the people,
in addition to being absent for five years,
there's always suspicion about a website that suddenly comes back
after being away in the hands of the federal government for a number of years.
People think, hey, this is some kind of trap now.
Not that the site was up to anything, but it does hurt.
It's like when we get preempted for a month.
People have no idea who we are when we come back.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's –
I want to distinguish between being suspicious.
If the government had taken hardware, which they may or may not have done,
and if they had the hardware for five years, they probably did something to it.
But when you take a domain name and then give it back,
there's really not a whole lot you can do to it in the interim that will have a lasting effect.
All right.
We sort of veered away from the Donald Trump topic, unfortunately,
because we still have a little bit more to say because it's very relevant.
It turns out that a Caltrans sign out in California was hacked.
With support for Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump,
it says, vote Donald Trump on a highway sign.
Can you believe this made it into all the newspapers?
It's kind of like when we – well, when we knew people that hacked the sign
in the New York City subway system back in 1997.
That said 2600 or something.
Anyway, someone reprogrammed the northbound I-5 freeway sign
at Ontario Avenue to read,
Inland Empire supports Donald Trump.
Marry Xmas. Vote Donald Trump,
the California Department of Transportation said in a statement.
Now, Nikki Warden was on her way back from the movies
when she and her husband saw the sign backing the GOP frontrunner.
The pair exited the freeway, turned around and passed the message again
while recording it on video.
That's according to KABC-TV Channel 7.
That post has received more than 450,000 views
since it was published on Facebook.
Why? It's a sign.
Bernie, you know how simple it is to hack these signs, right?
It's not difficult.
I think it's been made more difficult recently,
but I guess nothing more –
I mean, this happened like 20 years ago.
And then the Department of Transportation in various states
started using passwords and it was a little bit harder.
We haven't heard about this for a long time
because it was such a story that was non-news.
But to my knowledge, this is the first case
where someone has hacked a traffic sign,
electronic traffic sign,
to promote a presidential candidate.
Has that ever happened before?
Oh, I'm sure it has.
But you said one thing that struck me.
They started to use passwords?
They didn't use passwords?
No, I mean, I've played around with some of these signs in the past.
And there were no passwords.
You could just –
as long as you could open the box.
Sometimes the box was locked, but that wasn't hard.
But now there's – the newer signs have –
you have to enter a password,
which is probably the same password for the whole state.
But I wonder if we're going to see more of this
to promote political candidates.
What other alternative media will be used
to promote presidential candidates this year?
I was going to add it, but it probably comes back around
and becomes easy again.
You said at first it was easy.
Then it got hard because they added passwords.
And maybe it comes back around.
They do another sort of access –
technological access milestone.
And then it's easy again because it's on an app
or in some other kind of silly protocol
like Bluetooth or something.
I'd like to see somebody hack the overhead signs.
We're talking about the ones that are on the side of the road.
They usually have a generator attached to them.
The orange and white.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to get access to them.
With amber lights, yeah.
But the ones that are above the highway,
obviously you're not going to climb up there and program it.
It's programmed from a remote system.
And if you hack one of those,
you're probably hacking the entire network.
So everybody on the highway will see what you're saying.
That to me, that would be something worthy of note
and worthy of a news story and worthy of the time
that we've spent on it so far.
I'd rather talk about the dark web hacking forum,
which is back online.
Welcome to hell.
That's according to Motherboard.
Months after users speculated it was swarmed by undercover cops
and its founder shut it down,
the now infamous forum for hacking tips and stolen data is back.
You may have heard of it when someone dumped
the internet information of 4 million users
from the hookup site Adult Friend Finder.
The company was forced to publicly admit the breach,
which exposed users' sexual orientation, age, gender, and race.
Hell's original administrator, known as Ping,
shut down the site in July after rumors of internal disputes
and law enforcement presence undermined the forum.
But the forum is now alive again, apparently under new management.
And because posts are not timestamped,
it's impossible to tell when the forum reappeared.
I love it. This is great.
A low number of new posts has caused observers to speculate
that the relaunch occurred as recently as last weekend.
Hell is now public.
A new administrator known as Ha, that's capital H, capital A,
wrote in a post,
anyone can share the hell URL where they see it.
And I don't see it here, unfortunately.
You'll have to find hell on your own.
The site is run through the anonymizing browser Tor.
Users have expressed skepticism that the new forum
is any safer than the original forum,
writing in a thread titled, is this actually safe?
A user, who I'm going to not name,
says, how am I to trust the site administrator?
Well, Ha responds to that,
don't worry about anything regarding LE, law enforcement, NSA, and others.
Basically, if you suspect anyone to be LE,
please let us know that we can take proper action against them
since this is not a place for them.
Well, I think they'll beg to differ,
they'll infiltrate in whatever way they can,
but interesting to see.
I bet Ha stands for hell administrator.
Oh, wow.
You're halfway to cracking them again.
I'm half a junior gumshoe.
Or maybe you're Ha yourself.
Did you ever think of that?
Ha!
Okay, well, how about that.
Here's some policy changes that are taking place with the new year.
From our favorite people over at the Transportation Stupidity...
Wait, no, that's not what it stands for, is it?
Who wrote that?
Transportation...
I think you had it right the first time.
Well, I think I did, too, but that's not officially what...
What's the second word? Does anybody remember?
I think safety.
No, it's not that.
It's got nothing to do with safety.
Well, they think it does.
Security theater.
Yeah, but that would be...
Well, you know what, TSA.
I mean, if you really want, I can Google it.
Well, we all know who they are.
We have their files.
Transportation Security Administration.
Okay.
Did you actually look that up?
Yeah.
Because you really didn't know.
Why would I know?
Wow.
They're the idiots at the airport.
Okay, well, you called them that.
I was trying to be respectful.
In the blue shirts, right? Royal blue.
You know, I don't look at their outfit.
I'm too busy just trying to not make eye contact with anybody when I'm going through one of those things.
Yeah, them.
Anyway, they have a new policy for screening airline passengers.
And remember we were talking about this.
About the full-body scanners that they introduced that we all had the option of opting out.
And we started to question, is it necessary to opt out?
I know, Kyle, you've opted out many times for various reasons.
Well, guess what?
You're not going to have the option anymore.
Yeah, you can...
Of course, it's not going to happen to everybody.
But they can say, you know what, you're going through the full-body scan and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
The change in policy that recently began means airline passengers can still ask TSA officers for a pat-down search instead of having to go through a full-body scanner.
But the TSA officers now have the right to deny your request for a pat-down search.
And here's the best part.
If warranted by security considerations.
In other words, if they feel like it, if your skin's a certain color, if they just don't like you.
And now if you refuse to go through the full-body scanner, the TSA can keep you from boarding your flight.
And guess what?
You don't get a refund for that flight because it's not the airline that kept you from getting on board.
December 18th memo from the Department of Homeland Security that outlines a change in policy does not give a reason for the change.
And in a statement, of course, the TSA said most passengers won't be affected by the change.
Only the troublemakers.
This will occur in a very limited number of circumstances where enhanced screening is required.
Now, the full-body scanners use x-rays to create what look like nude images of passengers.
Actually, that was discontinued in 2013 after passengers complained about that potential privacy violation.
Today's full-body scanners, which are used pretty much at all commercial airports, use millimeter wave technology to create the image of a generic avatar on a screen.
And if the scanner discovers a lump on the passenger that could represent a weapon or maybe a tumor, who knows.
The machine shows a yellow box on the screen avatar indicating where the lump has been spotted.
On social media sites like Twitter, news of the new TSA policy sparked a debate over whether the change would make air travel safer or lead to racial profiling.
What do you guys think?
B.
B? Racial profiling?
Yeah. I mean, or something profiling. Who knows?
They refuse to publish the criteria that they will use to determine if someone must be required to go through this thing or not, which means, you know, we can guess what the criteria are.
You know, to be honest, I've gone through it a couple of times myself just to save time.
And I've also opted out a couple of times because I had time. I didn't want to go through it.
But I wonder if more people aren't opting out now.
Anyone here have feelings about this?
I mean, I've done both. The whole thing is stupid, right?
That's clear. And it's a question if you want to make a stupid protest against a stupid thing or if you want to go along with the stupid thing.
There's no good options.
Well, I think they're making air travel exponentially more uncomfortable to people.
And I think it's going to have an impact in that sense.
I think, as Mike said, there's probably going to be some profiling.
And just general resentment for those people that work there and check you out.
And I don't know. Personally, I'm not interested in being scanned for my own privacy.
You know, I just don't. I would like not to do that.
I've walked through lots and lots and lots of metal detectors at airports.
But I've never, ever, ever gone through anything like the X-ray, the early X-ray scanners they had.
Or any of the millimeter wave scanners.
I've been in Kiev airport. I've been in some pretty hairy countries and been able to talk my way out of it.
Even when I have absolutely no understanding of the lettering, the alphabet, the language, anything.
I've been able to communicate that I would prefer not to be scanned.
Sometimes it has to do with film and being an artist.
But I also, personally, just don't want to be subject to that.
And I've been fine talking to a human and having them look in your bags and run their hand on your back or something.
It's no big deal.
To me, it's a choice that you should have as a traveler.
I don't know. For me, personally, I'm just going to look for alternate ways to get around.
Maybe it's turned into a big deal for the TSA people.
Maybe they don't want to pat people down anymore.
Maybe they're tired of doing that and they just want to send everybody through a machine and look at a screen.
Rob, how about you?
I think it's troubling.
We've all mentioned now that however angry you were with the invasive scanning to begin with,
sometimes you go through it to save time.
Sometimes you don't have the time to stand by your principles and want to opt out of it.
And I think that's a big indication of what they're trying to do here.
Because once you get people to see a certain amount of inconvenience as normal,
you can go on to the next step of what you want to do with them.
There's an old thought experiment called the boiling frog,
which is if you put a frog in water and then quickly turn the temperature up to boiling, the frog will jump out.
But if you slowly turn the temperature up degree by degree, the frog won't notice that it's getting hotter
and just sit there and boil.
So I think it relates to that.
I think it's just a matter of making people okay with being hassled to another degree without any actual return in safety.
Bernie, how about you?
I agree with Rob.
I think we're being socially conditioned by our government to put up with more and more invasive,
privacy-invasive things being literally probed and touched and patted down and groped.
I mean, I don't like it.
I'm wondering if these newer machines that just put up an avatar on a screen with a yellow blob is,
if you have a metal object and you, I've always wondered, I've never done this,
but I've always wanted to get some lead thread or some lead tape.
Oh, boy.
And like sew it into my jacket, dispel out some message to the TSA,
so when I go through one of these things, they'd read the message on their screen.
Of course, I'm sure that would subject me to all kinds of punishment and so forth.
So I've never done it.
But I'm wondering, somebody's got to have tried this.
If they're not, if they haven't, I hope somebody does try it.
Well, now you've just inspired somebody to do that.
There you go.
That's what I'm trying to do.
I mean, I think this whole thing is fascinating as a sort of social thing because it's the first really civil liberties violation
that like predominantly affects rich people.
So it's really interesting to see the response to that.
There's very few things in that category.
But I also like wonder, to Rob's point, like what is the principle that makes a pat down better than a millimeter wave scan,
except that that's not the one they want you to pick and it's fun to tick them off.
Like I don't get it.
Like I've opted out.
I've gone through the thing.
I've done both.
Neither one is fun.
But I don't exactly understand what principle I'm upholding besides they don't want me to do this,
so I'm going to do it, which maybe that's enough.
It's your choice.
Like you had the option to opt out.
So you did not have to be subject to that.
But like why is one my preference?
I don't really know.
I don't want to participate in it because it shows more of a visualization of my body
than I'm comfortable with some troglodyte behind a computer screen looking at.
And also there are issues with possible health concerns, which we can dismiss.
But you know what?
We don't really know.
Let's also like let's look at being a pat down opt out type.
You're pretty relegated to like, you know, wait and you're pretty you're not like it's not like a party in and of itself.
Like you have to sit there and wait.
It's a hassle.
They have to wait for the one person.
They have to like get the right gender of who to help you.
Right.
It's not exactly like a breeze to to to do that.
But if if it's your choice, it's your choice.
Right.
I mean, it was your choice.
But help me make the choice.
What should my preference be?
What if you're transgender?
Do you think you have to have a transgender person?
Well, you know, you can add more questions to this, Bernie.
I mean, there are serious issues where these machines will detect people's genitalia as anomalies because their presentation of gender doesn't match their their physical sex at birth.
It's a serious issue.
Right.
But they they are primarily looking for metal.
Is that is that how they know they're looking for objects?
The advantage, the supposed advantage of these things over the metal detectors is that they can find non metal objects.
OK, good.
But I think if you're asking me which which I would prefer, which choice I would prefer, I think the choice I would prefer would be when I flew in the 80s and you did just go through a box standard metal detector that I think provided the pretty much the same level of security as all the rigamarole now does, except it was much less of a hassle.
Well, you know, and before that, you didn't even go through a metal detector to get on planes, just like you don't go through metal detectors to get on trains or to get on a bus to get on the subway.
And I wonder if we accept this, will we be accepting it down the road and all kinds of almost uncountable instances going into school, you know, going into any public space whatsoever?
It's how much we are willing to accept.
And I think you should always look at everything with that.
And I don't think we should be the guinea pigs for it.
I remember before the millimeter wave, they had some other kind of X-ray.
And to what you said with health issues, I mean, why should we be just testing their equipment on mass for them if if they're not even getting the right technology choice when they're designing these things in the first place?
They had to, like, tear out a whole bunch of them because they were X-ray and it was unhealthy.
So then they bring in the millimeter wave.
Right. And oh, that's that works.
Why does anybody ask, like, do we have any evidence?
It's like it hasn't been in service that long.
Like, why just submit?
Because society's agreed that it's OK.
Like, oh, we messed up on the first one, but we're going to we're going to we're going to get it right.
I mean, I don't want to be a participant in that.
And I would like to see some more evidence as to how this kind of scrutiny actually protects me in flight.
I mean, they've been having plenty of their own troubles, like in the last year or two.
If you're speaking about aviation in general, I guess they have other issues there.
And as far as safety, like, I really don't think them scanning me or anybody else beyond like a metal detector, like what Rob's saying.
And already, I mean, they have X-ray for your belongings, your bags.
And of course, there's all kinds of scanning for luggage in the actual baggage control areas, especially on international flights and on and on and on and on and on.
So I don't think personally being like scanned is I don't see that increasing my flight safety.
It might make them feel better.
It might be easier for their workflow.
Yeah, that's what I think it is, because I don't see this.
I don't see any clear evidence that this has found things that another method would not have found.
So what you're saying, we should be part of the dialogue, part of the conversation, part of the decision.
And they simply bypass the public.
And that's a big mistake.
But, you know, I'll tell you why I don't like it.
It's when you find yourself going through one of these full body scanners, they tell you empty all your pockets.
And you know how many pockets I have?
And they're all categorized differently.
OK, this pocket here.
I'll show you.
I have this pocket here.
I've got all my cash, this pocket over there, all my credit cards over here.
Well, let's not talk about what's in that pocket.
There's some medical equipment and receipts in my back pocket.
I have a lot of pockets.
Sometimes I forget how many pockets I have.
If I have to put everything into one stupid tray, then I've got to sort it back again.
And when I'm going through the full body thing, I have to trust that they're not stealing things from me, particularly cash.
With the old machines, you didn't have to do that.
You just took metal out of your pockets.
And you could keep track of things that way.
I don't want to put everything into one basket and then have to spend time putting it all back together.
And then they give you dirty looks, and you're spending time putting things back together and holding up the line.
So there's that, on top of everything else.
I think basically the TSA agents got tired of us having some sort of control.
An ability to say, stop.
Well, okay.
And now they want to deny you.
That awkward thing where you have to wait 25 minutes for some person of the right gender or whatever to come and frisk you.
Now they get to deny you.
They get to say, no.
No, you have to.
The thing that this reminds me of in the subways of New York, we've seen this, where there's a bag check, a random bag check.
Well, you know what?
You have the option to walk away and not subject yourself to it.
And they keep them on the outside so that when you're already in the system, you're not faced with a bag check that you can't get away from.
Well, that can change in the exact same way.
They can say, you know what?
You no longer have the right to walk away.
And we're going to be doing it inside.
We're going to be doing it on trains now.
They can change that at the drop of a hat.
And I'm sure how easily people accept changes like this will have an effect on how easily they make those decisions.
And I think that perfectly illustrates the boiling frog issue because I remember very clearly when the bag checks were instituted after September 11, 2001 happened.
This is just a temporary measure during this time of heightened security.
Everyone's scared.
We're just going to do this for now.
And here we are 15 years later, and they're still at it with no signs of stopping.
It's a normal thing now.
Are you talking about random bag checks before boarding, like, at the Jetway?
On the subways.
Like, your bags are subject to a random search.
Okay, yeah.
Well, there was also a lot of that.
And we've seen it in Europe a little bit, but I remember distinctly after 9-11, traveling and at the Jetway, they were randomly pulling people.
And it's not uncommon in other places like we've seen in Prague or in Portugal.
The message I want to leave people with is regardless of how you feel about this, regardless of what decision you make, the way this was done is wrong.
The way they simply changed the rules and you don't have any say in it because they can do that to anything.
And it's something we should be really concerned about.
Hey, we're going to try and take phone calls.
Our phone number is 718-780-8888.
718-780-8888.
Before we do that, Mike, I know there was a story involving T-Mobile in the news this week.
They had something involving video and ways people can optimize, but it turned out to be the exact opposite, right?
Yeah.
So, I don't know if you have the story, but T-Mobile has produced a plan, which is a clear violation of net neutrality,
where they prioritize certain video providers' stuff not by making it go faster, but by making it free,
which is a good deal if you can get in on the plan as a content provider and a bad deal if you can't.
But it turns out that regardless of whether or not the video provider you're dealing with is part of this plan,
they slow down all video traffic so that high-quality video can't stream even though the network would be able to support it.
This is the clearest violation of net neutrality this country has ever seen.
They made it sound so good, though, when they announced it.
How did they announce it again?
They said that you can now optimize your video and make things better.
They say there's a box quote.
The EFF, by the way, which is a wonderful organization we praise all the time, is the group that did the research,
and they have a box on their article quoting T-Mobile's advertising copy,
where they say that T-Mobile utilizes streaming video optimization technology throughout its network
to help customers stretch their high-speed data while streaming video.
Sign me up. It sounds great.
Well, I think you're already signed up if you're a T-Mobile customer.
Wait, then why are they pushing it, then, if they just sign people up mandatorily?
Well, they want you to switch to T-Mobile because they think that their technology is so great.
So you will wind up—translate this for us.
So if you're watching or downloading or otherwise making any video go over T-Mobile's network,
it will be rate-limited so that it can't go too fast.
So if you're trying to watch high-definition video, you won't be able to because it needs more bandwidth than they will let you.
So they appear to inspect your web traffic and determine if it is video traffic or not.
And if it is video traffic, then slow it down.
And how do they determine this?
According to the EFF's research, they don't even do it the easy way where the web server says,
here comes a video. They don't even look at that.
They actually look at the data that is coming across.
So they did an experiment where they sent a video across, but they labeled it like not a video, basically.
And that also got slowed down.
The only way to defeat this is, of course, to use HTTPS, to use encryption,
so that T-Mobile can't see what is going across their network,
which is what you should do all the time if you have the choice.
But you might not have the choice.
Is that called packet inspection, Mike?
Yeah.
Okay. So they were using that.
Wow. Okay. That's kind of scary. We'll see where that goes in weeks ahead.
Hey, let's take some phone calls. 718-780-8888.
Good evening. You're on Off The Hook. Go ahead.
Hello. Happy New Year to my good friends at Off The Hook.
Happy New Year. What's on your mind?
Happy New Year. I guess I'm asking an opinion from you guys.
I'm an older engineer, and I'm working with a young person who's going to start a small company,
a small business, okay, a young 22-year-old.
My advice is that they need to set up a Twitter account and a Facebook account
because it seems like you almost have to have it these days to run a business, you know?
And, you know, in the old days, you just print up flyers.
You're going to do like a small construction.
You're going to do like building decks or put an addition on someone's house.
Now it seems like you have to have a Facebook and Twitter account,
and I just wanted to know what you guys thought about that.
Are you meeting resistance for this idea?
Well, you know what, it just seems like it's like almost essential these days to do that.
To me, in my time back in the 80s when I was a kid, you know,
we'd just print out flyers, just stick them on a car windshield,
or you'd go door to door and stick them in people's mailboxes, you know, like,
hey, you want your house painted.
But now it seems like you have to have everything on social media.
Yeah, it is. It has become a bit akin to, I guess what we might have said,
is like having your own domain or a business card would have been maybe even earlier than that,
or white pages or yellow pages kind of advertising method.
It's all of that, I guess, now.
And there's even entire departments and very large corporations dedicated to this
or an entire position where someone oversees that.
People get paid full salaries just to monitor Twitter feeds and Facebook.
I mean, I'm sorry if I'm laughing at you, people out there who do this,
but I still can't get my head around that. That's incredible to me.
Yeah. The New York Times has a media correspondent who basically writes about their industry
and new media like social media.
That's different. They write a column. I'm talking about people who just tweet for a living.
Right. Well, it's kind of an arm of PR, I guess you would say.
And because these things are changing, I'm using the New York Times example,
because it's changed the dynamic. There are entire positions just to cover new media.
So with this, yeah, it is essential to at least have eyes on it if you're starting out
and you kind of get people excited about whatever it is that you're doing.
So it is more and more necessary.
Yeah. It's kind of the equivalent to when you used to print up those flyers back in the day
and hang them up in public places, you would put them where people were.
You would put them in public areas which got a lot of traffic,
where people you wanted to see your sign would.
And this is the modern equivalent of that.
People are on X or Y social network, and you want to be there where they are
because you want them to know about your thing.
Back in the day, it used to be licensed and insured and free estimates on your flyer.
These days, unless you have a Facebook page, I guess it doesn't...
Well, I wouldn't go that far, but it helps. It can help.
I mean, presumably the flyers you put up in the 80s had a phone number on them
because in the 80s that was the best way to reach you, for one person to reach another.
And that was an innovation.
At some point, people started putting phone numbers on these sorts of flyers
because it became the best way to reach people.
I wouldn't begin to know the answer of what is the best way
for contractors of that sort to be reached these days,
but I'm sure it is changing and will continue to change.
Okay, we're going to try and take another phone call.
Thanks for that call. Let's go over here.
Good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
I was afraid that was going to happen. We had eight calls.
They all disappeared. I don't know if they're still ringing someplace.
We don't know where it is. Please call back if you were just calling us.
Here's one call. Good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
Yeah, good evening. Thanks for taking my call.
Thanks.
I didn't come into the show from the beginning,
but I understand from the conversation about the airline for the searching and scanning,
that is now becoming, it's their decision, it's their choice
if you have to be scanned or if you have the option of having a pat-down.
You no longer have the choice.
Maybe.
I mean, you can say you prefer one or the other,
but it's up to them whether or not you get that.
Because I was, in my traveling, I always had a pat-down.
I never wanted to go through the machine.
And why was that?
I didn't trust it, and my wife, in fact, had cancer,
and she didn't want to go through that damn machine either.
I mean, I have already been subjected to enough radiation.
Well, that should be good enough.
They should respect that decision of yours.
You should have the right to make that decision.
Also, years ago, and this is going back a while,
we were living in Europe, and we were traveling, and we were in Italy.
And I remember in the summertime being in the train station in Milano,
and we were going someplace, and we were just hanging out waiting for a train,
and we saw this group of kids, young people with knapsacks,
and they're going someplace, God knows where.
And I remember these two kids were sitting there minding their own business,
young kids, maybe early 20s, you know,
and all of a sudden there's this dog sitting next to them.
And I'm thinking to myself, oh, yeah, look at that dog.
And the next thing I notice is there's two kind of beignetti walking up to these kids.
These kids are just going to get busted, you know, because the dogs smell drugs.
The dogs, they probably have pot or hash on them.
And these kids, instead of going on vacation,
they're now going to go to the bullies.
Yeah.
I mean, it's something that could be going on here.
I mean, so when you're talking about, you know, stop and frisk and such and such,
you know, I mean, it's been going on in other places in different ways for a while now.
Well, it's changing times, and we have to pay attention to these sort of things,
and we'll keep reporting on that.
Thanks for that call.
We're out of time.
We'll be back again next week.
We're going to have an announcement concerning the 11th Hope tomorrow morning
at 11 minutes past 11 o'clock.
Yeah.
Is that Eastern time?
That way you remember the name.
Eastern time, yes.
And we'll have an announcement concerning some of the plans.
So go to our website, www.2600.com, for more information on that.
Follow our Twitter account, which is either 2600 or hopeconf, H-O-P-E-C-O-N-F,
and you'll get more information that way,
but you'll probably hear about it through the mass media as well
because everybody's going to care about this,
and the mass media is following everything we do.
Write to us, O-T-H, at 2600.com.
This is Emmanuel for Off The Hook.
Have a good night.