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o'clock. Time once again for Off the Hook.
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.
And the very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening joined tonight by Rob
T. Firefly. Okay you're not coming up so let's try that again. Go ahead.
Good evening. That's better. Kyle. Hi how's it going. Bernie S. Somewhere. I'm sorry say that again. Greetings from Philadelphia. There you are. Okay. Yeah everything is we're having a bit of a rain deluge here in Brooklyn. So that that always makes things a little confusing. But here we are another Wednesday night. And also we have a special guest tonight. Jason Scott joins us. Hello everybody. From the Internet Archive text files dot com. Any other projects you're in the middle of.
Variations of same. Okay. That's good enough for us. We have a story that we're going to be featuring you on in just a couple of moments. But first we're going to go over a few other things that have been happening. Actually this is a story that we've gotten some attention on that actually it might be a little too late for us to talk about.
But we're going to talk about it anyway. It's the S.M.D.H. Act. What does the S.M.D.H. stand for. Is it slap my damn head. I think that's what it stands for. And you know that's why Congress gave it that particular acronym. And according to this E.F.F. release the clock is ticking. If Congress doesn't act soon the government will soon be able to use a search warrant to hack an untold number of computers located around the world.
Well apparently the clock has stopped ticking because as of today they either did something or they didn't do something. Bernie do you know which it is.
Apparently from from reports I've been reading in the news media it has taken effect or it will take the rule will now take effect Thursday. That is tomorrow. And it's too late for our senators to
slow this process down for more consideration to the dismay of Senator Ron Biden our our hero and and many other people from from the fine state of Oregon.
Yes it's going to be a bad year for him I think and for a lot of us. But for all credit though this is not something that we can blame on Trump. This is something we can blame on. Well who the Senate Obama whose fault is this.
Oh man. Yeah I think firmly with us. Got to start with us. Somebody somebody didn't pay attention. So we didn't get the word out. Right.
Well this is the first we're talking about it isn't it. Well we're doing our part. Yeah. Well not anymore. It's a little late. Yeah. It happened today. OK well let's at least talk about what this is.
It's a rule change scheduled to go into effect tomorrow December 1st. Despite the fact Congress has not yet weighed in or even held a single hearing. I don't understand how that's even possible.
Now according to the FF the fight will continue after December 1st since Congress has the ability to roll back the rule change once it goes into effect. But it's crucial that Congress pass the SMDH act as soon as possible which they did not do
and delay the rule change and take the time to hold hearings about a change that would significantly open up the government's hacking authority. So I'm OK. So they didn't do that.
The rule change is going to go into effect. But am I reading this correctly in interpreting that the fight can continue after December 1st. Are they saying because they didn't do this then all is lost.
Is there a Senate Senate rules and congressional rules are extremely complicated and probably take several shows to go into that. But there may be a workaround to allow or to to compel the Senate to make further consideration about about this law.
Basically this this law is an attempt by the Department of Justice to hack and perform electronic surveillance on a huge number of computers with a
single search warrant using the justification that evidence of criminality might pass through any one of those computers.
And this is like deja vu for me. I don't know how many of our listeners remember back in the mid 90s or so there was the Department of Justice.
The FBI was really pushing for permission to employ what's called roving wiretaps which are back in the days where there are pay phones that targets of interest.
Many have been using pay phones roving eye traps basically eliminate the requirement to specify the phone number of the of the phones that were going to be wiretapped.
And instead just said to specify like a geographic area like a particular neighborhood or or or or entire city on on on the premise that the target investigation might possibly use any pay phone in a particular neighborhood or city even though tons of other people might have been using those pay phones.
And this seems a lot like that that the government is going to ask you for permission to actually install malware on a huge number of computers that might have been affected by malware and perform electronic surveillance on those computers even though the people using those computers may have had no connection to to no real connection to the investigation.
And this really concerns me.
It should concern everybody.
It sounds similar to the mass collection.
The argument sounds similar to the mass collection of metadata that we recently went through, I think.
Wow.
Well, you know, it's while you were talking, Bernie, I'm searching on Google News for any news about the SMDH Act.
It's not a single story.
It's the first I heard of it.
That's all.
The only thing that it points to is is the EFF release.
So it's really we all need to do a better job on this, I think, because things like this will slip in and and we're all going to have to pay the price one way or another, whether it's less privacy or just having to fight all the time to get these things to to be overturned.
But there's more to come.
I'm sure if you miss this particular bad rule, there'll be more for us to fight against in the very near future.
I'm sure.
Yeah.
So just getting started.
Yeah, just getting started.
But, you know, we need more time.
We need so much more time to talk about all the issues.
Emmanuel, can we give our listeners a practical example of how this particular new rule will could affect.
Well, I would like to hear one myself because that's what I'm searching for right now.
Do you have that ability to tell us this?
My understanding of it is that if your computer has, you know, these things called botnets, which are basically sort of like denial of service.
Why we probably most of our listeners heard denial of service attacks were where there's a large number of computers that are used to send targeted email to a large number of other computers that could themselves be infected with malware to allow them to be used in more botnet attacks from large computers.
Large numbers of computers.
If your computer has been infected by malware as part of some botnet scheme, the Department of Justice should now, according to this new rule, be allowed to hack into your computer and look for evidence of where this malware attack may have come from, even though you yourself are not a target of the investigation.
And who knows what else they might find on your computer if the Department of Justice can hack into it.
I kind of think from past, you know, past stories over the past several decades of FBI overreaching that once they got their foot in the door in your computer or your home or wherever else you should have Fourth Amendment protections from, they're not going to stop looking at, you know, for, you know, specifically what they should be looking for.
It's basically carte blanche.
And, you know, a lot of computers around this country and around the world are infected with malware.
It could have been a result of a botware or one of these large-scale attacks and botnet attacks.
And, you know, so this really removes what I think are Fourth Amendment protections from a huge number of people whose computers might be infected by botnet attacks.
I would love to see the actual definition of malware in this because I'm wondering if TOR fits the definition as far as the people enforcing this would consider.
Yeah, I just wanted to add to clarify the botnet network would be a way of a scheme for pooling resources from computers that perhaps the owner doesn't actually have any knowledge of that.
And that's both a bandwidth and processing power.
And anyway, to the extent that they're being brought into an investigation, it isn't clear that they're, I mean, if they had no knowledge of the software and so on being exploited, that vulnerability being exploited, and then they then have to deal with the consequences of that.
It sort of leapfrogs the developers of that software who maybe made those mistakes or other third parties that included things that made it susceptible.
The liability doesn't really end up being with them.
Here, the recourse is landing on the user who's innocently been brought into this botnet.
Well, now, Bernie, when you talk about the FBI can hack your computer, I don't know.
It just seems like it's kind of what this mass media perception of our computers, our technology, that if you just want to hack something, you can hack it.
It's just that simple.
We've heard it with the election.
The Russians supposedly hacked our system.
And every time something goes wrong, somebody hacked it.
I'm just wondering, are we perhaps buying into that a little bit, saying the FBI can just, if they so desire, hack your computer and get all your private information?
It's a little more complex than that, isn't it?
Yeah, it's not simple for the FBI to do that, but they use a variety of techniques, some of which are developed by other agencies, to basically implant malicious software on your computer to allow them to do electronic surveillance on everything that goes through it.
Or is stored on it.
And it just occurred to me a minute ago, while we were talking about this, here's a real-world example.
Anthony Weiner, whose computers were a target of investigation for part of some sort of...
Sexting scandal.
Sexting investigation was...
In that case, this computer was seized, but the FBI found evidence of something completely related, and that was allegedly classified emails from Hillary Clinton's private email server.
And that opened up a whole other can of worms.
So, you know, the FBI's supposed to engage in what's called minimization, a method by which, if it's not related to the original investigation, they should ignore it.
But if they see evidence of any other kind of criminal wrongdoing, or what they think might be, then it opens a door for them.
And, you know, there's so many federal statutes on the books.
It's been estimated that a general person commits three felonies a day based on what's in the federal criminal code.
You know, I really am concerned about this carte blanche permission the Department of Justice now has for its law enforcement agencies to basically look at almost anybody's computer that's infected with malware through a botnet.
And we're talking about millions and millions of people's computers.
And how do you get the malware out after they've lost interest in you?
That's a really good question.
I mean, I would imagine that the FBI is cutting deals with antivirus software and anti-malware software producers, like, all right, don't have it delete our government malware because it's part of national security or some other such nonsense.
So, you know, I would not trust your typical antivirus software, anti-malware software to detect government viruses, malware, worms, that sort of thing.
I don't think we can be safe from it.
Well, now, speaking of malware and bad things that get put onto various systems, you guys have been following the story out of San Francisco.
The transit system.
This is unbelievable.
The San Francisco muni system.
Yeah, apparently had some ransomware injected into it one way or another.
And I believe this meant that everybody could ride the muni system for free.
Is that an inaccurate statement?
That's what the press is saying.
That's what the press is saying.
Okay.
But here's the other part of the whole story.
Apparently, the person who hacked their system was hacked themselves through basically answering questions to get his password from various sites correctly.
Somebody was able to gain access to the email system that the person was using.
And according to a source that spoke to Forbes magazine, this guy has been doing ransomware since August.
I reset the password within three tries of the answer.
It's a vigilante hacker.
They're calling him.
Contacted a security reporter.
Identify themselves as a security researcher.
And basically, the quote here is that it appears our attacker has been using a number of tools which enabled the scanning of large portions of the Internet and several specific targets for vulnerabilities.
San Francisco muni was a departure for this extortionist who previously had targeted private companies.
Targeting a public transport system is probably what got them hacked.
The saga began the Friday after Thanksgiving when this guy broke into San Francisco muni's computer system using ransomware or injected ransomware onto it.
Held the rail system in a stranglehold over the weekend for a ransom of 100 Bitcoin, which comes out to about $73,000.
Customers were allowed to ride the rails for free for as much of the weekend.
A good part of the weekend is as ticketing kiosks were left inoperable with screens of terminals reportedly reading you hacked all data encrypted.
I don't understand.
I don't understand how they are completely crippled by this.
Okay, your systems go down.
What you can't put people at the gates and just collect money that way.
Is it really?
Are we so incredibly dependent on our systems that when they fail and they always do fail at some point, we don't know how to recover.
And it's just it's like Mr. Robot where everything goes bananas and we have no control over the system anymore.
They say the hack affected 30 gigabytes of customer and employee data across more than 2000 computers.
About 25% of the muni's entire network and ticket machines were again working on Sunday morning.
Yeah, I just don't see why they can't go into local mode or something where they're not connected to the net.
And they just they're just able to process ticket sales and you don't put it on the network.
Okay, you figure that out later.
But at least your your revenue stream isn't isn't crippled in that time.
And San Francisco Muni confirmed in a blog post it would not pay any ransom for the breach, especially after after the guy got hacked himself.
The SFMTA has never considered paying the ransom.
We have an information technology team in place that can restore our systems.
That is what they are doing.
And the FBI Department Homeland Security are also on the case.
But that is the right approach, I think, to have backup so that you can go to the backups and restore things rather than pay some unknown entity when you don't even know that they're going to give you a code to unlock the software or your systems in the first place.
So, yeah, are we going to see more things like this, do you think?
We see a lot of it already.
I mean, the ransomware thing has really taken off like a like a rocket the last couple of years.
I've seen it in a lot of companies that I've done work for.
I've seen it in a lot of, you know, I've heard of it from from many others.
And it's just something that happens to everyone.
I know of a hospital that got hit with it and had to pay the ransom.
I know of a police department there was, you know, that hit the news a while back that had to pay the ransom.
They're the freaking cops.
One thing that I think I think is maybe I'm totally throwing this out there, but I think the prevalence of people of of social media or Web 2.0 platforms needing revenue streams and using adware networks that are then exploited to get this stuff to people, because that is the human element in this, that people are on these systems.
They're going out to the Internet.
They're using various things or or other harder, more more hardware focused ways where they're bringing like a flash drive or other equipment, maybe through Wi-Fi and their their handsets onto company networks and so on.
And that that hygiene is getting harder and harder as more and more of these platforms need a source of revenue to sort of survive in the in what we define as a tech economy now.
It does seem to be something that's affecting a lot of companies, a lot of people.
I've heard horror stories myself.
It doesn't seem like we're really I mean, we can we can detect viruses and malware and expunge them from systems before they cause much damage.
This seems to be something that the tools don't yet exist to say, hey, all your files are suddenly being encrypted.
Right. And this could be something you don't want.
And and you have situations like this.
The thing that's that's kind of interesting.
Have you noticed that every time this happens, they always the demands always call for them to pay in Bitcoin.
Right. I'm thinking, you know, these poor these poor libraries and hospitals and companies, the hardest part of all this is probably figuring out how to how to get onto Bitcoin in the first place so they can pay the ransom.
There have actually I've heard of cases where the the ransomware people had basically product support where where they would talk like, you know, some someone's grandmother or somebody on on, you know, getting the Bitcoin and putting in the the information and everything they need to do to get their stuff back.
So they walk you through it.
They've got training videos to set up your wallet.
Wow. OK, well, you know, that's what they got.
So you've been hacked. Please watch our five minute.
Pretty much. Hey, this is.
Well, I mean, that's a serious story, too, especially if you do it to a hospital or a grandmother or something.
That's that's not cool. Yeah. Ouch. Yeah.
Yeah. Especially your local hospital.
He was kind of funny. Some other possible targets.
Well, Donald Trump, certainly that would be funny.
Can you imagine if all of his computer systems assets were.
I'm sorry, I was miles away.
I just had the big grin on my face.
Well, yeah, but it could happen to anybody.
Yes, it could happen to any any entity anywhere, anytime.
Yeah. We really have to be vigilant and be very careful, very deliberate in what you're where you're navigating on the Web these days.
It's it's wild as ever.
But this is a more serious story because this this involves a terrible crime and an injustice that that follows.
Even that a Kentucky hacker who exposed the identities of high school football players who gang raped an unconscious 16 year old girl and spread a video of the assault has pleaded guilty and is now facing a longer prison term than the rapists.
Yeah, this is this is where we live now.
Derek Lestutter pleaded guilty last week to one count of conspiracy and one count of making false statements to law enforcement agents for hacking into Ohio's Steubenville High School football fan Web site.
Roll Red Roll in 2012.
The 29 year old hacker who was known online as K.Y.
Anonymous has admitted to hacking into the site with another hacker, Noah McHugh, to upload a video to the fan site that showed evidence of the 2012 rape of an unconscious West Virginia 16 year old girl by members of the football team.
Lestutter and McHugh used the rapist's own videos to expose them.
The Steubenville players who referred to themselves as the rape crew had dragged the unconscious girl from party to party, taking photos and videos of their actions that they eventually shared online.
In the videos, the Steubenville football players joke about the rape.
The 16 year old victim said she drank from a red cup earlier in the evening and became so intoxicated that she couldn't stop the assault.
And when the victim attempted to press charges, her character was attacked in the small town, according to Reuters.
The crime gained national attention at the time, in part because the rapist inadvertently helped provide much of the evidence themselves through social media after the victim was unable to recall details of the crime.
The video that Lestutter uploaded to the Steubenville fan website also included threats to disclose details that showed school faculty members and parents were involved in covering up the rape and demanded that those who are responsible come forward and apologize.
Now, some members of the school administration were later found guilty of attempting to cover up the crime.
A grand jury indicted four school officials over the scandal and for involvement in another rape of a 14 year old girl in April of 2012.
The school's technology director also later pled guilty to deleting files related to the rape.
Conspiracy any? Yeah.
Two of the rapists, Trent Mays and Malik Richmond, were found guilty of rape and kidnapping.
They were sentenced to two years and one year respectively in a juvenile detention center and had already been released.
Lestutter said the hack with McHugh was intended to bring attention to the August 2012 rape to harass and intimidate people and to gain notoriety and publicity for their online identities.
I'm quoting now from the plea agreement that he had to sign.
He's an alleged member of NightSec, which is an infamous hacker group according to a publication or website called HackRead.
He has allegedly also taken an active part in the hacking of Hunter Moore, a revenge porn tycoon.
A revenge porn tycoon. Yeah.
Okay. He's taken part in hacking that person. Wow.
And also our friends at the Westboro Baptist Church hate group.
This this they should be throwing a parade for this guy.
So the hacker community has now turned their back on Lestutter, accusing him online of seeking fame through his hacking activities, which they say is the cardinal sin of hacktivism.
I don't know what I'm reading here.
This is allegedly a news story from a site called Inquisitor, but they they state that like it's a fact.
The hacker community has turned their back on.
No, they haven't.
Maybe some elements have, but this is a terrible, a terrible turn of events that this guy is facing more prison time for revealing this than the people who actually committed the crime are.
And this is something that needs to be needs to be talked about, needs to be spread around, needs to be shared.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
The the the action, I think, is the result of it.
Getting that information out there is I mean, it doesn't even compare at all.
And I think that should be taken in consider into consideration, like the issues that are being revealed by this.
I don't care if he's trying to get fame for himself.
I mean, he needs the fame if he's going to be sentenced to prison for for revealing a crime in the first place.
And yeah, let the fame come.
Is notoriety something he can really control?
I mean, he can control what he does, but as far as around the issue.
But if other people take note of it, that's not really, I think, in his wheelhouse.
He can't really stop that.
Or, you know, and you can't really say that that's his motive if he's clearly doing it to make another of also very obvious statement that this is wrong.
We've talked about whistleblowers and their importance a lot on this program.
And that's what we have here.
We have the case of somebody who was blowing the whistle on something truly awful and and now is burning for it.
Yes, Bernie.
Do we think that everybody guilty in this in this rape and the cover up of it, this group rape, gang rape and cover up of it would have been held accountable or not for this hacking attempt to successful hacking attempt to get this video and publish it online?
From what I'm reading, absolutely not.
It seems like revealing that information is is what made the case actually go forward.
So, you know, obviously there was some damage to the to the victim in this event, in this in this gang rape.
And that videos of her being raped were circulated online.
And that's that's horrific, not quite as horrific as what happened to her.
But, you know, what this is really at this case brings up a lot of questions to what what is acceptable and what what should people do to hold people accountable for horrific crimes?
Clearly, the law enforcement authorities in that jurisdiction weren't doing their jobs.
And people at the at the high school were covering this stuff up.
So what what was what we're right here?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely clear on all the details as to how how it was being disseminated before by the the people in the school and how it was being disseminated after after this leak.
But it seems pretty clear that were it not for the leak, the the prosecution would not have gone forward.
And for that, you have to basically acknowledge the person for for helping justice be served and not further punish somebody for doing that.
But, you know, it's I'm sure there are nuances to this that we're not getting from this story.
But it just seems like a typical injustice to threaten the person that reveals the information as if they were the criminal when the crime is what they're revealing.
I'm sure we'll have more to report on this because it's it's an ongoing story.
But we have another story that we want to focus on, too, and that involves our special guest.
And I guess we'll just jump right to it.
I can look at the story of the the the headline says the entire Internet will be archived in Canada to protect it from Trump.
Well, OK, Jason, that's that's that's a good headline.
I know you're.
Yeah, no, I got a grocery cart full of hard disks right outside.
Yeah, I was going to mention that.
They are getting wet.
They're getting very wet.
Yeah, just as Internet. So as long as people act fast, you know, we'll get much more weather.
Please stay away from that, folks, if you're on Atlantic Avenue.
But yeah, but you're with Internet Archive, obviously.
And and you're constantly archiving things.
I'm always watching with fascination the things that you're saving.
I can use an example.
Some of the things you saved just in the past year.
Oh, sure.
So I work at the Internet Archive.
My title is free range archivist.
I am not technically a spokesperson for the entire Internet Archive and all of its actions and all of its people, employees and endeavors.
So if you if I said something wrong, I made it up and I should be ignored.
But the Internet Archive is well known for being the Wayback Machine, which is that place you go to to look at what a website looked like over the years.
And it's also a repository for scanned books, audio movies, software and a whole variety of other electronic data.
And it's been doing this for 20 years as of this year.
And there's a lot of material up there for my own personal things I've been involved in this year.
We grabbed a whole bunch of every elected officials site during the election cycle, trying to get a recording of their entire site.
Oh, wow. Things change.
OK.
We are currently in the process of archiving lots and lots of government data websites.
I myself put up it'll be nine thousand nine hundred and fifty hip hop mixtapes on.
Well, I didn't know about this.
OK. Yeah.
Well, you know, there's these sites that provide hip hop mixtapes.
And, you know, I mean, every once in a while, one of them is a particularly annoying repackaging of stuff that's out there.
But a lot of them are like these these giveaways that are meant to kind of keep an interest in an artist in between their albums and concerts.
Right. And when it started out, it was free in the 70s.
Obviously, it was something you handed out or sold cheaply out of your car to say, come, you know, come, come this Saturday to this party in this park.
So here's some tapes to listen to while you wait for me.
And over the years, it kind of codified into a semi professional and then professional thing where CDs would come out and go, here's my new mixtape.
And it's them rapping over beats or it's kind of like a DJ showing you their mixes.
And these have been collected on and off over the past few years.
And I started to get concerned because there a lot of them were on torrents and torrents die.
And a lot of them were disparate and in weird places.
And I said, OK, look, let's just let's just see how many there are and put them up.
And it's nine thousand nine hundred so far.
But there's 17000 that I'm aware of.
So it's taking me a while to find others.
And and I've done the same thing, by the way, for rave mixtapes.
And I've done the same thing for just straight up recorded folk mixtapes.
You know, all these tapes and things that were kind of passed around that are extremely fragile.
And so by making them electronic, making them available and you have this nonprofit library.
So if anyone's like that, that tape is actually whatever they they send us a message and we go, oops, sorry.
You know, we put up ten thousand and and then it goes away.
But on the on the whole, these are always were meant to keep the artist's name in in in in the news in some way of like in between this professional.
And it's, of course, as you might expect, super.
The goalposts keep moving and it's very weird because it's like Kanye will come out with a mixtape and then he'll come out with an album that's like 15 bucks and then he'll come out with a mixtape.
And figuring out which is which has always been weird.
But but it's actually happening.
But then you have people who are they don't even have a contract and they're just trying to get their name out.
And so they go there and it's just it fascinated me.
I don't like a lot of it.
Like Sturgeon's Law falls into this as well.
It's probably good you don't because you'd be spending all your time listening to it then.
Yeah. You know, the time consuming thing I've been involved in, I think, since we last talked was over the edge, which was a negative land in negative land.
Don Joyce's piece. They have an archivist who has been who is archived most of the shows.
There's a few years that are lost in here and there.
But over the edge at KPFA, KPFA, our sister station in Berkeley.
And we have put up 675 full shows of Don Joyce's show going back forever.
And he would describe them except for when he didn't.
And so there's a bunch that are just the show and title and the day it was put up and nothing else.
And so I have been listening to those shows and writing them in Don's voice.
I signed them as me.
And we have a similar type of problem with off the hook sometimes.
Yeah. And what I've done, what I believe that something like the archive does, like you always have this problem of you'll have a fan site and fans are amazing.
And what they'll do is they'll grab, you know, 100 copies of something, anything from something that has technically owners to something that just happened.
And they'll exhaustively note it.
And then they'll die.
They'll get a new interest.
They'll have a conflict with the original creator.
And it disappears because they're never technically the official place.
And by having a nonprofit library like the archive have a lot of these materials, I've been trying to encourage, OK, look, it's here.
If someone has a problem with it, it is a problem with it existing.
They'll come to us and talk to us.
It won't be I don't like this guy or it's hosted on the wrong kind of site or whatever.
It's us. It's a library, neutral ground.
And then I will reach out and say, does anyone want to help?
So, for instance, I've been working very hard to put up every hacker conference video, like just going back.
And people are like, what's a hacker conference in your definition?
And my definition is if they can put a drink on the podium and nobody complains.
And that actually turns out to work pretty well.
And so, you know, we just put up most of ShmooCon.
And so some people are going in and describing, you know, the ShmooCon videos and so on.
And these large archives of material end up on the archive and are kind of treated as, OK, this is it.
This is the big roundup.
They're all torrentable because we put a torrent in for every item on the site, millions of torrents.
We have it on this bandwidth.
No ads, no weird adware.
We don't remix them with ads.
And then people can say, OK, here's the canonical copy.
Here's the description.
In terms of this audience, one of the things I've really been big on is old manuals.
So I've been getting my hands on thousands and thousands of manuals.
And people have been giving those to me.
And there's a whole project which would absolutely derail this whole conversation.
But I have, you know, 75,000 paper manuals sitting inside of an abandoned coffee shop.
We have three boxes for you.
We were going to bring them and we totally forgot.
I think there's a copy of Lemmings in there too.
Yeah.
Things like that.
Things that are lying around the office.
Yeah.
And so people have been, you know, so at the archive, like I said, primarily people know us as the Wayback Machine.
But there's also these literally millions of other cultural artifacts that have been put up there.
And I have a personal bent towards old software and old technological stuff.
But someone will come to me with, you know, 100 old sewing patterns from the 1800s.
And I'm like, let's put that up.
So I try to be agnostic and just try to literally be the library that doesn't need to fade.
Like, you know, I mean, it's a terrible comparison.
But, you know, like with Netflix, the reason stuff disappears isn't because they don't want it up there.
It's because they negotiate with a group.
And the group says, we give you a standard two-year contract or a one-year contract.
And then it ends.
And at the end, they look at the numbers and they say, well, only five people looked at it last month.
So, yeah, who needs it?
At the archive, we're like, somebody looked at it one time.
You know, we don't really play that game.
And so not being that based, we'll let the long tail go on for, you know, years and years and years.
And to be honest, you know, like one of the ones I find really inspiring is there's like these really old electrical engineering books that are up there.
And I've seen they've gotten 10,000 reads and more.
And I'm like, that's some poor person's engineering degree.
That's what got them on to that without having to, you know, they could pull it down and read it.
And they don't have to be like, oh, man, where am I going to go to community college in between my two jobs?
You know, like somebody can actually start to get the, you know, because these things, these facts haven't changed.
Like electricity still works the same way.
If it's from the 20s, it's OK.
Generally, ohms are still ohms.
Well, it's interesting.
You're talking about this material that Netflix in particular goes away because people aren't watching it.
Have you encountered material that is simply locked away and is some Norman Lear pieces come to mind actually from the 70s that have not been aired since then?
They're in a warehouse someplace, I think in Chicago.
And because nobody has the rights to them, nobody can see them.
That bothers me because you have examples of artwork that because of financial reasons is eventually going to decay and never be seen again.
How do you fight something like that?
How do you preserve material that's locked in warehouses?
So on a greater conversation on that, it's a shame that so much of the culture of the world is a product.
And that's just the shame.
Yes.
And so some parts of that are neat.
That is to say the packaging is nicer.
Yes.
But the fact is is that things tend to have an owner and an owner tends to have a voice.
And there is no well, let's let's take it out of town or let's take it into town to Manhattan.
Right.
One of the things that's talked about is that there is a part of a housing issue because in some cases it's easier for an oligarch to buy some property in Manhattan as a solid investment to, you know, let's assume they made it legitimately selling tuna cans.
But, you know, this billionaire tuna can salesman has bought apartments and then just leaves them empty because it's an investment.
And maybe one of his employees gets it as a gift, you know, to like hang out in.
But there's no rule.
So as a result, there's no there's no if nobody's there and now that's property that's not being used and everybody else is suffering on that little island.
And so there's there's an argument to say, well, maybe the rule should be different.
And how do you do that and whatever.
But you're going to hit at the heart of what is real estate to do that.
And the nature of art is that a lot of art is somebody's devised property such that they say, well, we made a show like we all get that we made a show and the show is 60 minutes long and it is this, you know, portrayal of this from beginning to end.
Al Pacino was happy in the beginning and he's dead at the end.
And this is a piece of work created by this company.
That kind of solid product itself now ends up in this weird world where it's of meaning to people other than the owner.
Like if you buy a house and then you don't do anything with it, your neighbors may get a little sad.
And there's some laws for like that.
But like nobody goes like, oh, this national treasure of Emanuel's house.
I used to see that when I was young.
And now he's put a tarp over it and I can't.
If it's a landmark, though, you can't do that.
Yeah. So you see, you do. That's what I mean.
You then get into a point of like things get so up.
But when you get to that point, like Tesla's old laboratory or something, you get into this weird position where after a lot of effort and with a lot of you'll look at them and it'll be years long, intense work.
These things will then be given a new life.
You only ever see that with commercial properties with a couple companies who have made that.
They're Ballowick, for instance, Rhino or Criterion.
And what you're talking about there is people who are so passionate.
We will spend seven years tracking down what hedge fund actually owns the defunct studio that made this and get them to sign off in a way that, you know, our professional negotiator can do that.
And the problem is, is that the reason that they do that is because it can then become another product, not because it's freeing it.
Like you can't we don't have a Jubilee for art yet.
Maybe we will at some point, but we don't.
That'd be a neat thing to do, actually.
Art Jubilee.
But so as a result, if you take away that, if you take away those products, there's a whole bunch of other material out there that I feel like people are trained to not give high shrift to.
Which is like I can listen to these mixtapes or I can listen to a show that somebody put up and that will fill my life richly.
Like I will not be missing out because I don't have my own personal copy of Walking Dead right now.
I can do fine.
And I think that's a fundamental shift in perception.
I just wanted to add Shout Factory to your list because they're good, too, as far as releasing forgotten material.
There are companies who have made this their goal.
We need more.
And I think maybe after a certain period of time, maybe artistic works can be declared national landmarks and where they have to be released with the basic cost to restore them or whatever.
But it shouldn't be permitted to have something just decay someplace where nobody can access.
And it's always very shocking to see kind of how some materials just don't have any real home and they are of meaning.
There's so many things that are like zines and weird acoustic recordings that somebody did once and then never touched again.
Or I'm thinking of like there's these like you'll have all of these VHS based things that came out in the late 80s, early 90s where people were recording things and then handing them out.
And they were they were selling them in like 10 stores and there's only like five copies and they were meant to go everywhere.
And if when you get your hands on them, you're like, wow, this is I'm glad this lives again.
There's also Bob Dylan recordings from over 50 years ago that were bootleg recordings.
And after 50 years, apparently they can they can be released freely unless the studio takes ownership of them.
So the studio apparently is taking ownership of bootleg recordings and re-releasing them, but only re-releasing them to a few hundred people on vinyl in a foreign country.
So they have control over it, but they're in effect strangling the possibility of this work coming out, which I thought, you know, it's really horrible to do that.
So on a so so bringing it back to where I think it's I don't sound like a lunatic.
You know, a lot of the stuff on the archive is stuff where this people have already chosen.
Like, I want my stuff to get out there and I don't want to slap it on YouTube or YouTube doesn't like it because I use a sample from Hawaii five.
Oh, it's crazy. And so they want a place to put it.
Like, for instance, there's a really good example is the Kmart tapes.
We had a guy who in the night. OK, so the way Kmart did it for years was, you know, if for the people who've never been to a Kmart, which is short for a Kresge Mart.
What now? Kresge Mart. Didn't know that. Yeah, Kresge.
And, you know, what Caldor stands for? No. Calvin and Doris.
Who's Calvin and Doris? The happy couple who had the first store. I knew Calvin and Hobbes didn't know Calvin and Doris. Calvin and Doris had Caldor.
So there's this heritage of Kmart putting up announcements over their over their speaker system and they would have music to make you shop and they would have announcements and they were on tapes.
And in the 90s, there was a guy who was working one and they'd get a new tape every week and he would take the old tape and he would keep it.
So he had a couple dozen tapes. So he put them on YouTube. They start randomly matching their content ID system for weird things.
And I'm like, come, come stay with us. And so we put them up and we've had like millions of plays.
Apparently, we are really hip with the vaporware crop vapor vapor wave vapor wave.
And I and I this is when I became old. I've become old partially because four terrible gray hairs have appeared at the top of my head.
But also also because I looked up because it was tagged with a vapor wave.
And I said, oh, what is vapor wave? And I looked it up on Wikipedia, I think it was.
And it said that it was descended from witch house and see punk. And I went, I know none of that.
I am now dead. I am no longer a vibrant part of the stream of consciousness of human society. That's fine.
But we put these things up and millions of people have listened to these.
And these what I love is that when the news came out that these Kmart tapes were up there, there was older employees who said, oh, you know, I have the reel to reels from the 70s.
Do you want those two? We were like, yes. So that's how I got to hear the Kmart theme.
I was just going to say when I was thinking as you're talking, I'm hearing that some of these things that people might not lock away when we recontextualize them and other people say like, hey, that's really cool.
I'm glad we have that. Do you think that has an impact on the ones that are locked up that people then maybe might reconsider there is any power in that?
Like it's funny because you'll see these things where like I would say that there if you I'm stumbling backwards into an area I don't know very well, but the revival of Hong Kong action flicks and then kind of like the reengineering of that.
That history, I think, can partially be ascribed to efforts on the parts of several distributors and several real fans to make sure that they had play in this country to the point that eventually places like the ones who discovered Kevin Smith, those guys, they were involved in a whole bunch of martial arts flicks playing in like certain smaller theaters and so on.
That's where you saw this culture that existed that was being pulled into the mainstream again and now suddenly we see Kill Bill and then suddenly we see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon getting a full release here and I think that you really do see that.
So I mean culture is like a living creature.
It needs to be given a home and watered and treated well and given respect.
That makes me think of like RZA and Wu-Tang because they were already sampling and licensing for the music, but they're big fans anyway.
I got to step in here, folks.
This happens every time we talk to Jason.
I know.
We haven't gotten to the story yet, which is why we brought you in here.
Well, here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
So I think this is how it's critical to your folks.
Moving the entire internet to Canada.
What's going on?
We have about five minutes to talk about this.
Oh, fantastic.
So we're this organization, this nonprofit.
We've been around since 1996.
We have the Wayback Machine and we have petabytes and petabytes of everything from old websites to music, audio, and everything else.
And there are – that's a lot of data.
And it's always been an exciting engineering challenge to have – we have something like 30 petabytes of data in total.
And making that available every day is an adventure to make sure, like, fixing hard drives.
And we swap through a pallet of hard drives every month, just keeping them up, just keeping them going.
And that's some amazing people out there.
Yo, Hank.
Yo, Trevor.
Yo, Tracy.
Yo, everybody.
And these are people who are, like, kicking butt all day.
And so one of the things is we have copies elsewhere of a lot of the data.
We have one in Egypt.
We have some stuff in Amsterdam.
Don't tell people where it is.
It's okay.
All right.
But, you know, we have stuff around.
But what happened was it was always for an organization that always was on the edge of money loss.
Like, we're always kind of – you know, we're a nonprofit.
We're not one of those nonprofits that you look at it and you go, hmm, they took in $45 million worth of donations
and, hmm, they put $35 of it towards admin.
We're not like that.
So, I mean, we were doing between $12 and $15 million a year to cost.
And we were bringing in $11 or $12.
And, you know, we have a whole bunch of things going on.
So the idea of fully engineering a complete new data center with all of the content and everything else is a big financial burden.
Right.
So we were always, like, looking at different solutions.
And then finally we said, okay, let's really revisit this now.
When was this when you said that?
Let's go with this month.
Okay.
So if I'm not mistaken, it's a certain event that happened at the beginning of this month that basically inspired this conversation to be renewed.
To be renewed.
But, I mean, it was an ongoing conversation.
Right.
And I think that there's a narrative because the press does what the press does.
So, first of all, they'll use the phrase, we're moving to Canada.
And it sounds like this beautiful building that's out in San Francisco is going to be turned into a terrible dance club and be closed down at the end of the month.
And we're going to be in 17 tractor trailers and we'll be over the border by sundown.
You're already getting offers to rent it out.
Exactly.
Well, if we move our stuff out and we go back because we forgot something, there'll be 19 startups in there.
Don't worry.
There'll be 19 startups selling you something that their mothers used to do for them.
Right.
So we would be copying the data.
So there'd be another full location in Canada.
And this was something that the boss, Brewster Kahle, thought would be a good thing to do.
And he announced it as the beginning of our next fundraising cycle, which is we always try to not make every day a living hell of begging.
Right.
I think that's really...
We're trying that here.
It's tough because people don't know how much things cost.
There was a beautiful...
If I ever find the link for it, I'll send it to you.
It's a professional BBC TV guy, and he's walking with you in what looks like a standard BBC thing, but he's explaining to you what everything is costing right now.
He's like, I'm shooting right now.
I just want you to know there's five people over here.
We had to do this.
We paid for this.
This was here.
This is what this is costing, even though it looks like it's just a guy walking around.
And a lot of people don't understand to keep something up that gets between three and five million people a day...
We're up in the top 200 websites, and there's not many of those that both have no ads and, B, don't keep your IP address.
And so to keep that going costs amounts.
So we try to have a fundraising piece.
And so one of them is we should really make another big duplicate.
Let's do that.
That got kind of squelched into this weird narrative of, you know, the country's in a bit of turmoil, and people think this is for something or a reaction.
And it's more a case of, no, that's something to think about.
And I think that your audience, the audience of yours that is technical, I would say the great thing about there's several ways to prepare.
And you can prepare like a person who reasonably looks at things and says, I should make preparations.
And then there's the person who says, every night I scare myself silly, and I come up with 90,000 things that will attack me in the night, and I'm going to build a pillow fort against all of them.
Right. It's like the difference between the smart thing to do and the irrational thing to do.
Sure.
Living your life as if you are a blind, scared deer is just not a great lifestyle choice.
I'm going to get in on that.
It's not a great lifestyle choice.
But living like somebody who says, I live in a house, houses occasionally burn, maybe I should get a smoke alarm, and maybe I should come up with a method, not so bad.
Should you be checking every smoke alarm every day?
Also not recommended.
So you're saying the United States is like a burning house, and you wish to keep safety by moving things to Canada.
I think that the United States can be thought of as a place that has a lot of wonderful, beautiful things about it.
And one of them has always been some measure of unpredictability.
And that the nature of archives and libraries is that sometimes they get put in crosshairs or in the middle of conflicts that they don't really need to be in.
I mean, when a library is told to ban a book, that is often a parent who is afraid of things for their children or an organization that is afraid of their parents.
And it's not about the book, and it's not about the kid.
And I think that's important.
I hate to do this, but we're out of time.
I'm glad we were able to cover this very difficult subject deeply.
Well, tell us how people can help, how they can get involved, how they can learn more, everything that you possibly can think of.
Absolutely.
So the Internet Archive is located in San Francisco, and there's archive.org.
For some people, they know it as web.archive.org.
There's archive.org slash donate.
We can tell you what we're doing and why we're about it.
We also have a Canadian address for the Internet Archive of Canada, which is a separate organization.
That's always existed, right?
And that has existed since 2004.
And they will take paper checks as donations for the moment, and they're a nonprofit as well.
And it's all a real thing.
And I am Jason at textfiles.com or J-S-C-O-T-T at archive.org.
And if this is the first time you're hearing about this, I'd love to hear from you.
Jason, we have to have you back because there's so much you do that is fascinating and vital.
It's about the hip-hop mixtapes.
I understand.
We need a thousand more of you.
But, folks, please visit the Internet Archives, learn more about this project, and help out however you can.
And that's it for us.
Off the hook this week.
We'll be back again next week, hopefully.
And you can write to us, oth at 2600.com.
See you next week.
Good night.
Just plain confusion
How do you feel?
Well, I don't know just how I feel
All I know is that I love you
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Here we go!
There is no single circumstance that ever took a final chance
Indeed, it's everything that you can see and touch forever
That always looked the same from every angle and never cast a shadow
That would change the way you thought about me
Thank you, that's what you're worth being
Would always be, would always be, would always be
Would always be the truth
How do you feel?
Well, I don't know just how I feel
All I know is that I love you
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Oh, alright!
Yeah!
Well, I don't know just how I feel
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Surreal, surreal, surreal
Surreal, surreal, surreal
There is no single circumstance that ever took a final chance
Indeed, it's everything that you can see and touch forever
That always looked the same from every angle and never cast a shadow
That would change the way you thought about me
That what we're seeing
Would always be, would always be, would always be
Would always be the truth
Well, I don't...