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It's 8.01, which means it's time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bon Diddley Bon for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bon Diddley Bon!
Bon Diddley Bon!
Bon Diddley Bon!
Bon Diddley Bon!
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hey.
Jim, how you doing?
Hello.
And somewhere is Bernie S.
Yes, greetings from Philadelphia.
All right.
We have a lot planned tonight.
We're going to be talking to people live from Standing Rock in just a little bit.
But there are some other things that we should also focus upon because it's kind of, I think, dramatic.
Almost, folks.
Almost.
I know it doesn't count, but it's a big almost.
We were almost the, I don't know, it's not man of the year, thing of the year, I guess.
Person of the year.
Person of the year.
Objects of the year.
Yeah, well, we all know who won, who the man of the year is.
I can't say I'm surprised, right?
You know, Kyle, don't you?
Have you seen the story?
Oh, I think I know what you're talking about.
Are you using your 2600 ski cap as a microphone cover thing?
Yes.
Wow.
It works.
It does work, doesn't it?
There's no pop sopper here.
So, yeah, I used the hacker mentality and used my knit 2600 knit cap.
Wow.
Okay.
That I got from our holiday special.
So if you get tired of putting it on your head, you can put it on the microphone and
run a radio station.
That's great.
It's true.
It's true.
Now I want one.
Not to toot our own product's horns, but I think you sound a lot better through that
than you usually do.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to hear me without this.
It's the black one, not the navy blue one.
Well, yeah.
All right, whatever.
No, it's true.
Anyway, get back to the point here.
Man of the year, Donald J. Trump.
And I mean, even I can't be surprised by that.
Why are you raving your fist in the air, Jim?
That's not that's not anything to be proud of.
Yeah, that was definitely gesticulating.
Yeah, it's it's basically a foregone conclusion.
I mean, who else?
Who else could possibly after this year that we just went through?
And number two, Hillary Rodham Clinton runner up.
She must she must be hitting a wall with a fist right now.
Again, runner up to this guy.
But number three, number three, the hackers.
I did not see this coming.
Really?
Yeah.
And there's a piece that ran in time today.
Just read a little bit of it.
Hackers have a bad name everywhere, it seems, except in Silicon Valley.
Founded as it was on the virtues of creatively overcoming technical limits by any means.
This tradition produced the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg,
who on the eve of Facebook's initial public offering four years ago, lamented the unfairly negative connotation of the word.
Hacking, he wrote, just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.
Like most things, it can be used for good or bad.
We've said this many, many times.
This year will be remembered for the bad.
Hardly a week went by without news of some kind of digital breach somewhere in the world,
often establishing some kind of record for sheer scope, for novel tactics or for setting an ominous new precedent.
Hackers broke into the U.S. Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and likely the National Security Agency.
They stole or tried to sell data from private companies, including Adult Friend Finder, LinkedIn, Mail.ru, and Yahoo.
They leaked the confidential medical records of elite athletes Simone Biles and Serena and Venus Williams,
the private photos of celebrities, including comedian Leslie Jones,
and along the way, the embarrassing password choices of a billionaire hacker named Zuckerberg.
They blocked millions of Americans from accessing the Internet one day this fall
by remotely taking control of legions of web-connected gadgets, such as baby monitors and digital video recorders,
to unleash floods of bogus traffic.
They shut down the San Francisco Municipal Railway over Thanksgiving weekend
after an IT administrator allegedly clicked one wrong link embedded in a malicious email.
You know, I'm not going to continue here because it goes on for quite a ways,
but for God's sake, I mean, you might as well blame human beings and say all of this is their fault.
To say that hackers are responsible for all these negative things that are basically the result of people
who don't have a clue using machines and doing things they're not supposed to do,
and then saying every evil person out there is ipso facto a hacker, that is just so naive,
and I can't believe time would fall for this.
Hackers are people who fix these systems, who design these systems,
and yeah, there might be some evil people out there too,
but to just paint the broad brush and say all hackers are evil in this way,
I thought we had progressed beyond that.
Yeah, it feels easy to do, creating a monolith when you're describing a community like this,
you're doing something wrong, like you're getting it wrong.
It's not a monolith, and to treat it like that ignores the diversity,
and as you said, the sort of autonomy of individuals, the people proper,
deserve a little bit better than to be lumped into a fictitious monolith like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, it's always kind of disheartening when once again the entire hacker community
is painted with this sort of Hollywood bad guy brush,
and blamed for everything that's gone wrong with these systems
that everyone's using every day of their lives now,
but on the other hand, the whole person of the year list I think was kind of gloomy this year.
Of course Donald Trump won, and of course Hillary Clinton was second,
but I guess it takes those two to beat us, so that's kind of maybe a compliment.
I don't know if she really earned second, to be honest, I don't want to be nasty here,
but Donald Trump I could see, because everybody was just talking about him all year long,
and the whole year was defined by all the things he kept doing,
despite what we thought he was going to wind up actually doing,
and hackers, though, I didn't see that, but I did predict,
I don't know if you remember this, last year, end of year show,
we all predicted something that's going to happen in the next year,
and I predicted, I haven't listened to this, I don't know exactly what I said,
but I know I said something involving hackers and the presidential election,
and somehow hackers would be blamed, or something along those lines.
I think that's exactly the wording, I think you said something effective,
the hackers will be found to be the culprits behind some revelation in the election cycle.
Well if that is true, I think I just deserve a little commendation for getting it right,
maybe people will listen to me when I warn them about things.
Hey, one of our listeners, Pyro, actually wrote in last week to claim something even more dramatic,
apparently, I don't know why he was listening to the June 20th, 2000 edition of Off the Hook,
but more power to you if you want to listen to our old shows, they are pretty entertaining,
and apparently I said something back then about Donald Trump running for president,
or Donald Trump being a politician, listen to this segment here.
All this anti-trust action is, you know, the same thing is going to happen with Microsoft.
You have to note that it's not necessarily the people who are best at what they're doing,
it's the people who are best at controlling the market, the best at the industry,
the best more at the politics than at the actual service.
Well, the people who are really bad at the actual service won't be surviving
to the point where they can go buy someone else.
I think it's the people who don't have the money that won't be surviving.
That's what I think. I don't think it has anything to do with quality.
Well, how does a business get money?
Just like I don't think Steve Forbes necessarily is, or Donald Trump.
Guys, we're doing a radio show here, if you don't mind.
Just like I don't think that they're, you know, the most brilliant people politically,
you know, I don't think these guys are the most, I don't know, technically savvy
because they just happen to be the monopoly. I just don't think it works that way.
Okay. I love how even then there were people barging in and interrupting the radio show.
But yeah, it seems just so bizarre and unfathomable
that something as ridiculous as a businessman of Donald Trump's stature
or Steve Forbes would enter the world of politics.
That was the example I was trying to make back then.
This is why the people, we were talking about the merger,
the proposed merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE that would create Verizon.
And how we got into a debate about whether monopolies were good or not.
I took the side that they were not.
And yeah, the point was being made that you can't trust the people
that are the biggest to get it technically right.
Just like you can't trust the biggest, richest business people to know anything about politics.
For what it's worth in retrospect, I agree with 16 years ago you.
Okay. Bernie, go ahead.
I just want to say I remember, you probably do too, I don't know, maybe it was 20 years ago,
Time Magazine chose the Internet as the something of the year on their cover.
Everybody was surprised because it wasn't a person, but it was the Internet.
So it's coming around the year.
Time is again recognizing that the Internet just didn't happen by itself.
It was developed by hackers.
Hackers built the Internet.
I mean, ostensibly the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA,
funded some of the initial project.
And Al Gore would probably take some credit for it too.
But the bottom line is the individuals that built the technology behind the Internet,
they were hackers in a true sense.
So this is not the first time that hackers were considered to be on the cover.
Well, I just think there could have been a much better tone when hackers were recognized
as being entity of the year, whatever you want to call them,
because there's so much positiveness that comes out of the hacker world.
We focus on that quite a bit.
And to just basically look at everything that went wrong and say, oh, it's the hackers' fault.
Not it's the fault of people who design bad systems,
not it's the fault of people who want to steal and rip people off,
or people who want to steal votes.
It's not their fault. It's all hackers.
It's not that simple. We all know this.
Slight correction to you, Bernie.
Time magazine has done this a few times where they've chosen a person of the year that's not quite a person.
In 2006, they chose you as the person of the year.
Bernie?
Well, not just Bernie, but the royal you, you in general.
And the cover was mirrored, so you saw yourself when you looked at it.
And again, in 2011, they chose the protester as the person of the year.
That mirrored cover almost put me in business, by the way.
It was very expensive for them to do that.
Yeah, but for both of those reasons, I actually have it on my resume that I'm a two-time person of the year.
But also, back in 2002, they had the whistleblowers were the person of the year.
And so that's a thing that Time has done a couple of times, a few times.
I don't know if it's a cop-out, they don't want to pick a person.
But no, it's interesting, and it might have been nice for the hackers,
even the ill-defined Hollywood bad guy hackers, to be person of the year this time.
I'm still really amazed that we were even in the running there.
I had no idea until you just told me.
It seems like they are missing the real, the true heroic things that hackers have been involved with,
aside from technical malady and still, to this day, rampant security vulnerabilities and lack of knowledge.
But there's been a great service that's been done, and it's just so funny.
I think this is the sentiment, that when things are going great, everybody will stand behind and fly the hacker banner.
But when things might be controversial, or they might be political, as we've seen this year,
and otherwise negative, people abandon the hackers.
Well, not altogether.
But I think the point is that the spoils of hacking and how successful it has been as far as being in the lexicon
and being a part of industry and technological advances, people love to sing the praises of it then.
But when things are difficult, they're less inclined to think of hackers as a good thing.
And I think that's bad, as you guys have said.
All right, well, moving on.
Bernie, you alerted us to something a little while ago that I don't want to consider as being alarmist, per se.
The headline read, huge solar storm could wipe out modern technology by 2020.
You know, the story itself is a lot calmer than the headline.
But is there actual truth to this possibility that there's something like a 12% chance that this is going to happen by 2020,
and that it's going to take us years to recover from it?
Yes, it's pretty likely.
I'm hearing a lot of echo in my voice right now.
We can hear you.
There's a thing called coronal mass ejections.
Anybody who's a regular shortwave listener knows about sunspots and how they affect the ionosphere.
Every two years, there's a cycle, these things go in a cycle.
And back in 1859, there was a huge coronal mass ejection that melted telegraph lines.
And there was another one back in 2013.
Or actually, yeah, back in 2012, there was another one.
But unfortunately, the sun was spinning on its axis, and it went the other way.
And this 25-day cycle, we missed it by nine days.
Had Earth been bathed by it, basically all the wires would have melted.
And people would not have.
We might have got sunburned.
There are scientists in San Diego who are saying that there is now a 12% chance this is going to happen by 2020,
which is only about three years from now.
So maybe we'll have a scientist sometime on between now and then to talk about this.
This isn't a Y2K theoretical thing.
This has happened before.
And it will happen again.
It's a question of when, kind of like earthquakes.
But I don't know.
This is one of the things I sent to us to consider.
I didn't know it would be covered tonight.
But it's something we should be following, because this could really affect everything that has wires in it,
the Internet, telephones, computers, TV and radio stations.
That will all go off the air if this happens again.
So we'll just keep watching this.
Keep looking up.
So if this happened, how extensive could, you know, just shooting the moon here, so to speak,
what would you guess the effect would be like?
Completely uneducated guess.
Well, we would not have.
What is the 12%?
Lloyds of London and the Atmospheric and Environmental Research Organization,
they estimated it would cost between $600 billion and $2.6 trillion.
That's $2,600 billion and take maybe four to ten years to recover from.
Just think, all electronic communications would basically cease unless, you know,
I guess ham radio operators who might have their radios, you know,
in a shielded room or something and then bring them out after the sun flare.
There would be that kind of communication.
It will be a while before stuff gets reconnected again.
And four to ten years to fully recover from this, that would change.
I think economies could collapse.
But maybe we get to people talking face to face again.
Wouldn't that be not interesting?
Yes, absolutely.
And so this is an event, a solar storm that happened recently.
As far as are you aware, Bernie, is this something that happened recently
and it will take a little bit to get to us?
Or this is just the 12% chance that a solar storm big enough
in the interim period of time could reach Earth
and disrupt technological stuff as we've said?
Well, a bunch of these things have happened.
The last one happened in 2012.
It just happened to be that the sun, which spins on its own axis on a 25-day cycle,
our days, was pointed in an opposite direction.
We missed it by nine days.
Had the planet and the sun lined up a certain way in 2012,
we'd still be recovering from this right now.
There was one a few years earlier that knocked out a whole lot of communications
in Canada because it wasn't as strong, but Canada was closer to the sun
in that part where it happened.
So this has happened before, and big ones have happened before
that didn't hit us, and one did hit us in 1859 that melted.
The only telecommunications in 1859 basically was telegraphs.
It was before radio.
Telegraphs, and it melted telegraph lines.
So this could happen here.
Those were open-wire communications lines.
Right, right.
Interesting.
Obviously people will protect certain technologies,
but there's so much stuff that's exposed
that it would be very hard to prevent against something like this.
So yes, this is something to watch, solar weather,
and I guess something to learn from.
It's ways to design maybe for this eventuality
because it's so hard to imagine being without so much at once.
Yeah, the fun part of this is considering, okay,
this took down telegraph lines in the 19th century,
but now we've got so much more going on than that.
We've got not only the above-ground lines and cabling and stuff,
but we've got satellites.
We've got wireless stuff going on,
and it's really interesting, I think,
to think about what it could mean to lose access to all of this.
So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing how this comes out one way or another.
This is the same phenomenon.
It's a natural occurrence that causes the borealis,
the northern lights in certain parts of the world.
So it's solar wind, yet another thing to prepare for.
Well, on that note, we have our guests connected
after a lot of phone heroics here.
We're speaking with Leisha and John out in Standing Rock.
Standing Rock, are you guys there with us?
Yes, I'm here with you.
Great, okay.
Sorry for all the histrionics here as far as connecting you guys.
We hung up a couple of times.
Well, okay, Leisha.
Leisha Sterling gave a talk at the HOPE Conference, actually,
about the security of water.
Water security, a great title, by the way.
Are we in denial or in scene?
Yeah, water policies, availability, and Geeks Without Bounds, and you.
It was a Saturday morning talk.
It was very well received.
And I'm thrilled that we're able to have you on.
You're at Standing Rock now?
Yes, I am.
I'm actually sitting in the Cannonball Rec Center
about a mile or so south of the Utiti Shuckling Camp
because it's warm and I have a phone connection here.
Okay, and we're also joined by John Bigelow, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member
and head of the Oceti Sakowin Camp Media Team.
You're over there too, right?
Yes, I am.
Okay, and you warned us that your connectivity might cut out
because there's all kinds of things going on there with your connection.
Are you guys near each other as far as where you're actually standing now?
Yes, I can see him across the very long table.
We're in a very busy space at the moment.
We're at the room that's been sort of the headquarters
of the Voice of Utiti Shuckling Camp for the last couple of months.
And this room is attached to a rec center that at the moment is being used
as an emergency backup shelter for people who did not listen to the fact
that the winters are very harsh and you should not come with summer tents.
They are cold, so they are staying warm in the rec center.
This was the first thing I was going to bring up.
I understand you guys got hit with a real bonafide blizzard the other day.
Is that correct?
Yep, yeah.
We've actually gotten hit by two blizzards, a really nasty one.
Was it yesterday?
All time and space has blended into one while I've been here.
But I think it was yesterday when it was snowing so, so, so hard
and just road conditions were horrific.
Well, now, those of us who have been following the news
and following this story, which is really an incredible story,
you have thousands and thousands of people who are there
camped out protesting this pipeline.
You had something on the order of 2,000 veterans that were coming over
to protect them, to stand up for the water protectors.
And then on Sunday we had what appeared to be a victory
when the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they would not be granting
a permit to the company that is digging this pipeline.
In fact, I'm seeing stories where the Sioux leader is urging protesters to leave.
But I understand it's not quite that simple that this battle is not necessarily over yet.
Can you speak to that a little bit?
Sure.
I mean, I can speak to it a little bit in the sense that everything is shifting
very quickly right now kind of on all sides.
The fact of the matter is that back in October when we were doing the census
for how many people were going to stay here through the winter
to continue protecting the water, we had less than 300 people that were going to stay.
And we prepared for the winter for about 300 people.
By Thanksgiving we had 12,000 people, and that went down to maybe 9,000 to 10,000 people.
And then somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 veterans showed up.
And you can imagine that it's a lot harder to protect the health and safety
of that many people in what are very austere conditions
than it would have been if it were 300.
So that's certainly one of the reasons why with this one victory under our belt,
the Native leaders are saying like, okay, guys, go home now.
We're really grateful that you came, but we need to make sure that everybody who is here
is healthy and safe and warm because it's not going to do us any good to protect the water
and lose our own lives in the process.
Good point.
Right now as everything is happening, we want to make sure that there are people on the ground
to monitor what's going on up there.
Are they or are they not digging now?
Are they opening 1806 back up?
Are they going to take down the big floodlights that have been shining down on the camp
since after the October 27th raid of the treaty camp?
What's going to happen next?
So we definitely need to have people on the ground that are going to monitor that,
but it should be a much, much smaller core group of people that we can sustainably take care of
through this bitter winter.
I see.
Now 1806 is the road that they've barricaded off that prevents a lot of people from getting there.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
I mean, it would take to get up to the Mandan-Bismarck area, if that were open,
it would take 35 to 40 minutes to get up there.
Right now you have to do this big roundabout where you go Highway 24 and Highway 6,
and it takes like an hour just to get to Mandan and an hour and a half to get to Bismarck
where most of the stores and things are if you need to get supplies.
Well, that was my next question.
My next question, how do you supply this number of people, 12,000 people at one point you said.
Is there a lot of cooking going on?
Are there kitchens?
How does it all work?
Yeah, well, there are several sort of camp areas.
The big camp, Oceti Shakling, is the one that's on what they call Army Corps land.
It's really part of the land that the 1851 treaty gave to the great Sioux Nation,
but, you know, the Army Corps claims it now.
So Oceti Shakling is on that.
And then on the reservation side of the Cannonball River, there is the Rosebud,
or also called the Sicangu, which is the way you say that tribe's name in Lakota,
the Sicangu Camp, which is also sort of part of the Oceti Shakling community, you might say.
And then there's another camp called Sacred Stone,
which is a camp that existed even before this as private property.
It had a campground on it before this.
And when the first people came out to stand to protect the water,
they went to the obvious place to go to, which was the existing campground there.
And within each of those camps, there is at least one kitchen.
There's a big camp, Oceti Shakling, which when I had to, you know, map it out for the Mesh Network,
it's like 16 blocks, 16 San Francisco City blocks worth of space.
And that actually has many different kitchens in it.
The Oceti Shakling is broken into many different sub-camps.
There's Southwest Camp, there's Media Camp, there's Oglala Camp, there's Michigan Camp.
I mean, there's all these different groups of people in each of those camps.
Not every one of them, but most of them have their own kitchen.
Now, John, let me ask you, you're the head of the camp media team.
Does that mean you're the person talking to most of the mass media
and trying to convey what's actually going on?
Yeah, I suppose so.
As one of the few enrolled members of the Standing Rock tribe here,
the need was identified to have some venue to get the voice of the camp out to a broader public,
and I was foolish enough to raise my hand.
Wow. Well, glad you did.
It must be one hell of a challenge to get the media to get it right, or at least to attempt that.
It was early on.
We were getting beat up pretty bad, especially here in the local press.
The local people here in North Dakota, especially around the Bismarck-Bandan area,
were still very unclear what we were doing here,
and it's been a process over the last several weeks of trying to explain those things.
We have kind of a cultural rift where many of the non-Native people who live here and work here
have never had to learn about Lakota ways
and don't really understand the more intricate things about our culture.
So it's been both an informative as well as an educational process,
even with people who have lived right next door to the reservation for all of their lives.
Yeah, it's really important to educate and share with the community,
and it's so impressive that this has become something,
because early on we were not seeing as much coverage by large media entities,
which is, I think, it felt good at a certain point, I guess,
because having big media entities out there get it wrong has a great impact,
and it was much better to gather things and hear things from the grassroots level, smaller organizations.
And then as they were having difficulty covering the protests,
I think a lot of people were galvanized in support for getting the information out
so that the broader public and people, especially locally in the state,
could be informed to make wise decisions.
Has there been much media coverage from other countries in addition to our own?
Yeah, actually, the response from some European media outlets,
they had a presence in camp early on.
I know we've had media outlets from Germany and France and Italy and Spain
and even Al Jazeera has been here on the ground off and on
since I started putting this media team together.
We've had a better presence from media outside the United States
until recently when we started getting some traction with media,
American or United States media sources.
So I had a question.
Obviously, the large number of people that are requiring infrastructure
have led to some technical challenges,
and this resembles in a lot of ways hacker camps and events that have really amazed us
as far as bringing people together and sort of ad hoc infrastructure being built
around a movement or people that share an affinity for technology.
I'm wondering what kinds of things have you guys developed that have worked
and how quickly have people been able to take up building and using technology there,
either to be it keep safe or get news and information out?
What kinds of things are you planning in the future
as the camp size becomes a little bit more manageable?
Well, so one of the things I'd like to address first actually
is the difference between this and a hacker camp.
When we come together in hacker camps,
we all are coming together with a unified cultural value,
and we all have sort of stated rules and boundaries,
even if those rules are be excellent to everyone and this is a duocracy.
We've established that culture, and we go forward and do stuff, right?
Coming into a situation like coming into the U2G struggling camp,
as geeks without bounds coming in,
the very first thing that we had to do was come in and talk to the elders
and talk to community members and find out what they wanted
and let them set the tone for what they wanted the boundaries of the technology to be.
And also allow them to fully own the process of what technology was coming in and how.
A lot of people complained that there wasn't internet all over camp.
Actually, that was by request of the elders and the community itself.
Really?
They only wanted internet to be in specific locations.
And so we had our internet cafe space,
and we had internet available in just a few places.
Much to the chagrin of a lot of people who wanted to Facebook from their tent elsewhere.
And the elders were like, no, no, that's not what this is for.
So that was a big challenge, actually,
in terms of not just the building it part,
but just managing expectations between the internal community
of the Lakota and Nakota Dakota peoples that were here
that wanted to maintain this space as their own cultural space
and all of the allies that came in who wanted things to be more like,
you know, Burning Man or CCC.
Did you get a lot of that?
A lot of people just didn't get the cultural differences?
Did they learn at least?
But had a lot of exuberance.
Yeah.
So I don't want to give any specific examples,
but I can say that absolutely,
there were some really painfully embarrassing moments
in which people came into camp, you know,
thinking that they were doing great things
and were actually massively stepping on community's toes.
And there was a lot of learning done.
A lot of people, I think, have been transformed by the process, actually.
A lot of people have learned a little bit and are bringing that back home.
But I think that there have actually been a lot of people who came in,
like bulls in a china shop,
and have gone home with a new understanding.
John, is there anything you want to add to this?
Dakota and Nakota peoples have had a long history
of adopting new technologies, beginning with the horse.
When the horse was introduced here to America,
the Lakota people recognized the benefits
of how that would change their lifestyle,
and they integrated that into our culture in a complete way.
We've embraced things, including things like muskets and weapons,
into our culture and made them relevant parts of that.
So the process now, in this modern age,
of integrating technology and being able to use it,
I have to say some of our young people have done an incredible job
of learning things like how social media works
and being able to deploy those things
in a very, very effective way to help us get our message out
and to reflect in a culturally appropriate manner
how those tools can be used,
as we have done for probably the last 200 or 300 years.
Can you give us some examples
of how social media was used in a positive way?
Early on, this movement was actually begun
by the Indigenous Youth Council,
and they were able to get the message out early
about what was the danger that this pipeline posed,
not just to the local land,
but as well as to an entire watershed
that stretched across a water source for 18 million people
and how cultural relevance of protecting Mother Earth,
as well as our sacred sites, our burial sites,
they were able to key into these primary issues
in a way that set the stage
for a historic gathering of Indigenous peoples
here in North Dakota.
Yeah, that was definitely communicated.
I think that's been so powerful,
the reverence and the religious seriousness
of protecting our habitats and natural resources.
That, I don't think, has ever been so clear
as it was when people were starting to read about this
on social media and really wrap their heads around
just how important this is and the intersection
of a lot of issues that impact so many people.
Yeah, and I think use of the tools available,
technological tools like social media,
has been especially vital to this event
because I think it was the viral videos
that were starting to come out of the protests,
of abuse by authorities,
and of the information about why this is not a good thing.
It was that that I think forced the mainstream media
and more media outlets to pay attention
and start reporting on this.
John or Alicia, either one of you,
can you tell us maybe what some of the biggest
technological challenges you've faced
in this whole episode over the last few months?
Wow.
So, I've had twin technological challenges
of culture slash politics and just the terrain itself.
So, every single step along the way,
I have to make sure that all the members of the tribe
and the camp council and the camp leadership,
everybody's in line with what we're doing
and they're all okay with it and I'm not making anybody mad.
And that's actually a huge technical challenge
that people don't think about.
But the terrain here is such that
the camp is in this sort of bowl
and to get telephone service or internet service
or anything else to that bowl,
we had to shoot everything up to the top of a hill
that was outside of camp and then shoot it down into camp.
So, that hill is on private property.
We had to get permission to get onto that private property.
It's on the reservation.
Then, once we got all of the permissions and everybody happy,
by the way, the hill also happens to be a sacred location.
So, we were instructed that when we went up there
to do anything on the telecommunications tower
that we built there,
that we should make offerings of tobacco when we went up there.
So, there was that whole process of learning and being respectful.
And then we took what had been a broken down windmill
and turned it into a communications tower.
There are some pictures on the Geeks Without Bounds website
and also on our Facebook of our communications tower
and, wow, it's a hack.
It's a hack.
Wow.
Making that thing work was amazingly difficult.
What, by any stretch of the imagination,
should have been a week's worth of work took so much longer than that.
And other people who came in, volunteers who came in to assist,
had trouble with the solar.
The solar guy who came up to fix,
clearly I had messed up the solar, right?
I was sure that I had messed up the solar.
He came up, he looked at everything,
he couldn't figure out what was wrong and finally found the problem
and it was something really stupid.
It was actually a fuse that neither of us had actually even found in the system
until after we'd gone through the entire thing with a fine-tooth comb.
Little things like that just built up
and we had two PoE switches that were actually the wrong voltage.
They were sent to us.
They told us this always works with ubiquity dishes.
It's going to be great.
This will be wonderful.
Here's all the specs.
Here's how you set it up.
I set it up.
It didn't work.
After several days, I was sure that this is proof
that I'm an imposter, I can't make this system work.
Three other network guys showed up to camp on the same day
and I'm like,
okay, get in your van, you're coming with me up to the hop hill.
We get up there, they look at it and they go,
it's broken.
I'm like, no, no, no, it's not broken.
We just haven't figured out how to make it work.
They're like, no, it's broken.
We had to send that one back and get a new one in
and in the meantime, we ended up hacking that system even more.
We put in extra batteries and for a while we had it on a generator,
which we had to go up every four hours to put more gasoline into.
It was, oh man, that was a mess.
That hop hill will go down in history.
These are things that do remind me of what goes on at hacker camps,
but like you said, it's very different because, first of all,
we don't have hacker camps in the bitter cold,
in the middle of winter generally.
We don't have police that are spraying us with water cannons
and all kinds of other horrible things.
Honestly, we're there to have fun and learn
and what you guys are doing is miles above that.
Just what you're learning, the respect that you're showing,
I'm in total awe of that.
Now, I've heard rumors that there's some kind of a radio station
that you guys are either already operating
or are trying to put together for the entire camp.
Is that true?
There is a radio station.
I feel stupid because I don't actually know what Govinda's last name is.
He's just Govinda.
There's a guy named Govinda who often runs his radio station
on the Navajo Nation under a Navajo license.
He's up at Oceti Sekowin.
I think that it's at 87.9 Spirit Radio, and he's up there broadcasting.
He broadcasts what's happening down at the sacred fire.
He broadcasts when there's big, important meetings at the dome.
He broadcasts those things,
and he also has chats with people up in his radio van,
and we're hopefully going to get him.
Right now he doesn't have a solid Internet connection to his van,
but I just got a text message about an hour ago
saying that another pair of nanos has shown up,
so I'll be able to point an Internet connection to his van
and be able to broadcast on the net as well.
Wow.
Then the rest of you will be able to hear what's happening at camp as well.
Maybe we can listen on TuneIn or something outside the camp
and hear what's going on.
Exactly.
Once it's on the net, you'll be able to hear it from outside the camp.
I'll make sure to send you a text message or an email when he's up on the net
so you can hear it and tune in from outside.
Absolutely.
Please do share.
We, like so many other people, are watching this very closely
and are with you, if not physically, definitely spiritually,
and share the ingenuity and hacks that are leading to getting this story out.
On the subject, though, of physically being there,
now is the official word that we don't want more people to go there,
that we're kind of in a holding pattern until we see what happens in January?
The official word is this is an extraordinary cold time here in North Dakota.
If people can and if people want to return home to their families
they'll be safe and warm.
We encourage them to do that.
On the other hand, we are also still open to people, our allies,
who want to come here and stand in solidarity with us and support us.
We do ask that they understand where they are coming.
This is North Dakota.
Winter gear is not going to be adequate.
In fact, you should be kitted out with full Arctic gear.
Exposed skin in these conditions that we're experiencing here just tonight
can result in frostbite in a matter of two minutes.
If you're also going to come here, be prepared to contribute in a meaningful way to the camp,
either chopping wood or vegetables in the kitchen
or in some way realizing that we are doing things in a very, very difficult
and challenging environment and that everything that we do takes more time.
So, yes, we are encouraging people to remain safe.
And if they are not prepared, if all they came with was summer tents and light gear,
that they might think about returning home or heading to a warmer climate.
If you are here for the duration, please be self-sufficient, self-contained,
and willing to contribute in a positive way.
Wow. I get the gist of that.
For those people, though, that aren't able to make it out there physically,
what can they do from the comfort of their home, wherever they are in the world,
to help you guys out?
Check out our website.
That's OcetiShakowiCamp.org.
We do have some pages where we list some suggested ways that they can support the camp
from whatever locale they're in.
With the upcoming administration, as well as changing the Senate and Congress,
we will like people to help support us by getting a message to their local politicians
so that we might have that support going into and through the next coming year.
Now, John, we're having a little bit of trouble hearing you.
Alicia, do you know the website that he was referencing?
Can you spell it for us?
The website is OcetiShakowiCamp.org.
That's O-C-E-T-I-S-A-K-O-W-I-N-C-A-M-P dot O-R-G.
And there's lists of things that you can do that range from reaching out to government officials,
calling, writing letters, e-mails, all of that,
to when there's specific material needs, what those material needs are,
if there's any kind of campaign that's going out.
That's getting shared through the OcetiShakowiCamp.org website.
And also for people that are on Facebook, there is an Oceti ShakowiCamp organizational page on Facebook
that you can find a lot of information.
And we do appreciate having those things shared onwards as well.
Now, I know, Alicia, you've been involved with Geeks Without Bounds.
Can you tell us something about what Geeks Without Bounds does
and how people can get involved with that?
Yeah, so Geeks Without Bounds is a Washington State-based nonprofit organization.
We support humanitarian open-source technology.
So we work with communities and nonprofit organizations
and sometimes governmental agencies or U.N. agencies on specific technology challenges they may have.
We bring together subject matter experts and technologists and engineers of various stripes
to take the challenge and figure out how to come up with a solution
that is as much as possible an open-source solution, a replicable solution.
And then when there are promising solutions that work in one place,
we help the project team to figure out how they can become sustainable
so that we can spread that knowledge to other communities that need the same thing.
So we run hackathons through Random Hacks of Kindness,
and we have an accelerator program, and how you can get involved.
We have a website, gwob.org, and you can sign up for the newsletter.
You can volunteer to help on any number of projects.
We put out calls for volunteers through our newsletter fairly frequently.
And also if you have a community of hackers and makers that like doing hackathons
that actually make something that really works in the end,
Random Hacks of Kindness is a global hackathon event that happens the first weekend in December
and the first weekend in June every year.
And the projects that come out of Random Hacks of Kindness are given support,
lots of different types of support to become actual sustainable projects.
And also at those hackathons we take existing open-source humanitarian projects
and add feature requests so that you can spend a weekend
where you're not just competing for some prize.
What you're doing is spending a weekend volunteering your time for a cause that you care about.
So those are the best ways to get involved.
Well, Leisha Sterling and John Bigelow, we want to thank you so much for being on the show tonight,
and also thank you for what you're doing out there in the wilds of North Dakota.
You're true heroes, and the whole world is watching what you're up to,
and we're going to be following in the weeks ahead.
Yeah, thank you very much for sharing with us.
Thank you very much.
All right, stay warm.
All right, we'll be in touch again.
And that's going to pretty much do it for us here tonight.
What do you think?
I think this is why the hackers are the person of the year.
I think so.
Wouldn't it be nice if Time Magazine focused on that?
Because that is truly the spirit.
It goes beyond hacking.
This is humanity.
This is just opening ourselves up to other cultures and to what is right
and standing in the face of adversity.
I'm blown away by that.
And what's possible when we work together towards something.
And I encourage everybody listening, do a little research.
I guarantee you there's something about this story that intersects or impacts your life.
So check it out.
All right, oth at 2600.com, that's our email address.
Write to us with your thoughts and feelings.
We'll see you again next week.
Good night.
But I can't wait.
I can't wait.
Then it was bleak.
Trump hit his peak.
WikiLeaks debt ridden.
Ms. President, she lost it.
But the vote was sitting at two mil.
She was labeled a crook.
I can't look.
Now Trump is our president.
The country is shook.
Gotta see Moana.
I'm singing with a Chewbacca mom.
Hold the door, I bought some Amazon.
Now that Vine has gone, a voice saying, damn, Daniel.
Castro is dead.
We started retweeting and eating bagels made with rainbow bread.
You gotta put up a fence or two.
Is that Orlando blue?
More people are dead or destitute.
We gotta amend the Constitution.
Started giffing, tripping over Miss Universe names.
Pen pineapple, apple pen, and a neko atsume.
Scamming on every story my Instagram's on.
Bennett in the cabinet, no one knows what he plans on.
So go use your voice, time to take a new stand.
This new year you must do what you can.
This new year you must do what you can.
Fight the hate.
This new year you must do what you can.
Fight the hate.
This new year you must do what you can.
A new year I can't wait.
2016's over now.
2016's over now.
2016's over now.
We are waiting for it to be through.
Waiting for it to.
You can get out of jail.
Why are all all the askers so wide?
Oh, 2016's over now.
2016's over now.
It's America season two.
Is Snyder the one to blame?
Who would think they would win the game?
The world has finally gone insane.
Oh.
The final five, they won it all.
Ignore Ryan Lochte.
21 pilots telling me my face is blurry.
The kids are all on Musical.ly.
I bought a kit from Kylie.
You Venmo me.
Be reality.
I trust nobody.
Can't we just agree?
And me?
Just don't grab my.
There's only one more month until it's done.
And I can't wait.
We made it somehow.
2016's over now.
Any questions?