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And the time is just about 8 p.m. Time for another exciting edition
of Off The Hook.
Off The Hook.
Welcome
to Off The Hook. Rob T. Firefly here with you and
our regular contributors are all scattered to the four winds today
for this Halloween edition of Off The Hook. So
I am joined in the studio by some special guests.
Night Owl is here. Hello. Feathered Person
is here. And we're also joined by Telefonica.
Hello. Hello. Let me see if I can get your mics up a bit.
Yeah, that would probably. Okay, there we go.
Right. We all have voices. We can all use them to
do various radio type things. And
you've gathered here today for very special reasons.
One, because I didn't want to be here talking to myself for the hour, but
the other special reason, the thing that you three all have in common,
is you went to a special event that happened recently,
an event called PumpCon. And Night Owl, if you could tell us a bit
about PumpCon and what that might be.
So PumpCon is a fairly small hacker and
security conference that has been running every year for,
I'm not even sure how many years now. It's actually the oldest running
hacker conference in the US. Okay. Yeah, I know it's 20 something, 30.
Yes, it's older than DEF CON. Right, I just can't do hex in my head,
so anyway, it's very small by current standards.
It's only one track of speakers. It runs for about six hours on one day.
But the speakers that they do have are all very good speakers.
They're generally presenting things that you will not see anywhere else.
And it really attracts people who are very,
very dedicated to the subject, to the general field.
And this takes place where? It takes place in Philadelphia.
They move venues periodically. This year was, I believe,
at a location called the RUBA Club.
It's a very nice local sort of community theater and
nightclub and sort of community event venue.
It was a great time, had by pretty much everyone.
And it has, it also, because it is so small and so short,
it attracts a lot of ancillary social events for the hacker community.
So you get to see, so you get a lot of interaction,
a lot more social interaction that you don't necessarily get at other
conferences because people are always running off trying to get to the next
talk or to the next workshop or the next training.
Or there's just not enough hours in the day to navigate
the venue that you're in, especially if you're at something as large as DEFCON,
which is these days, I think, split between two different Las Vegas hotel.
Yes, two hotels in several planets, as I understand.
So had all three of you been to PumpCon before or was this your first or?
Yes, I think we've all been before, but I haven't.
Well, I have been since 1999.
Okay, so that counts as a veteran.
This was actually my first, the first time I'd ever been there.
For years, people at Hope have been telling me,
yo, you should just make the drive down.
And somehow I had never quite managed it until this year.
Excellent.
Well, we'll talk more about what went on at PumpCon in a moment.
First things first, I've got a couple other things to talk about.
One thing to talk about is, yes, we are still in our fun drive mode.
We are still trying to pay our exorbitant Empire State Building transmitter bill.
If you'd like the details on that, you can listen to our show of two weeks ago,
three weeks ago, where we go way into the situation we're in.
But basically, we've got a massive bill, a massive transmitter bill that
we did not know that we would have due to agreements since made and broken.
So, this station is in peril.
We say that a lot, but this station is in peril right now.
And we can't get through this without the support of our listeners,
the very thing that's kept us on the air for generations now.
We've got so many decades on the air here at WBAI.
We just celebrated 29 years of this particular program.
And we would like to keep doing what we do, but
we cannot do that without your help.
So, if you call our pledge line at 516-620-3602 in the US,
or if you go to give2wbai.org, you can help us stay in the air.
And you can get some cool stuff in return.
We have a collection of Hope keynotes,
keynotes from the Hope conferences that we put on every couple of years.
And the keynote speakers have been all sorts of luminaries from the hacker world
and from outside the hacker world.
And it's just, it's always been an experience.
And among the keynotes, who are just a few off the top of your heads?
Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake,
having one of the first big public speeches by Edward Snowden.
Yeah, and we'll be listening to a little bit of that in a bit.
But not just major political figures like Edward Snowden.
We've had software world luminaries like Richard Stallman,
Lloyd the Mentor Blankenship.
We've had people from other areas of public life,
like Aaron McGruder from the Boondocks, creator of the comic strip and
cartoon The Boondocks.
We've had Jello Biafra, former lead of the Dead Kennedys, punk icon.
And so, so many more people, Adam Savage of Mythbusters.
And I could go on and on and list, but
just I think the three of you are also longtime Hope attendees.
And I'm sure you've got particular,
do you have keynotes that made particular impacts on you?
Well, I think Jello Biafra's keynote at the last Hope,
I think was the first time I'd actually managed to make it to a keynote at a Hope
conference.
And it was just an amazing experience.
It was part going to a really amazing concert.
It was part a really great comedy set.
And it was just an amazingly passionate speech
about civil rights and community building and
the state of society at the time.
Awesome, yeah, it's really been a heck of a ride, just the sheer,
the massive amount of just brilliant people we've had come speak at our conferences.
And you will be getting all the keynote speeches, some other featured speakers and
things like that.
You'll be getting this all on a DVD set or
a single USB drive on MP4 files, DRM free,
high definition as high as we can get them based on the recording equipment of
the period because these conferences do go back to 1994 when HD stood for
probably something else.
But yeah, and you can get this all DRM free on the format of your choice
by going to givetowbai.org or dialing 516-620-3602 and
asking for the Hope Keynote Flash drive set or the Hope Keynote DVD set.
And what I'm gonna do is play an excerpt here that we've got of
Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden.
There was a particular exchange question from the audience, and
this was from Hope X in 2014.
And it's really worth listening to for many reasons.
So if you'll listen with us, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden.
So, Dan, my next question's for you.
Oftentimes, Ed's biggest critics often invoke your name.
And they invoke it in a positive way and
try to contrast what you did with what Edward did.
Can you talk about that a little bit?
How does that make you feel?
Do you agree with them?
Do you disagree with them?
The most recent was actually Secretary of State John Kerry,
who said that you were a hero, but Ed was not.
And so, can you expand on that a little bit?
Well, this bull in a way started with Barack Obama.
When somebody actually took the occasion to ask him about Manning.
Here in San Francisco, I was gonna say here, where I come from, in San Francisco.
And said, well, didn't Chelsea Manning, then Bradley,
do exactly what Ellsberg did, you know?
And with, well, he could have answered that various ways.
What he said was, Ellsberg's material was classified in a different manner.
Well, that was true, in a way.
As I mentioned earlier, everything that Manning put out was secret or less.
And everything I put out was top secret.
That was the difference.
And I think the person asking the question didn't pursue that.
And of course, in your case, I'll come back to that.
But in your case, higher than top secret.
Communications intelligence stuff, which I would earlier have said,
didn't deserve to be put out until you see what it says.
And then you see it's evidence of criminality.
And should not be subject to criminal prosecution for
revealing it, even though it is higher than top secret.
So since then, that was with Manning.
And I found then, that was starting in 2010, that thanks to Manning and
now to you, I'm getting more favorable publicity than in 40 years.
40 years.
Because suddenly, people who were all for putting me in prison for
life before, now realize that I was really a very good guy.
I was the good whistleblower.
And so I'm totally, of course, rejected this from the beginning.
I didn't want to be a foil for
showing up badly to people that I totally admired and identified with.
Because there have been lots of leakers, whistleblowers, and
I appreciate them all, ones who put out information that should have been known.
They're anonymous, I don't know their names on the whole.
But the difference here, to me, with Manning and
you, was that each showed very clearly, as I had felt 40 years ago,
a willingness to put out enough material that was gonna really be serious,
put us in prison for life.
When I read that Manning had said, as I used to say, to Adrian Lamo,
the wrong guy to confide in, that he was willing to go to prison for
life, or even be executed, I said to myself,
I have waited 40 years to hear somebody say that.
That's the way I felt 40 years ago, and it's taken this long.
But so I felt immediately an identification with him.
Obviously, in your case, in Manning's case, in my case,
we all have different backgrounds, we're different in many ways.
But we had the same access, interestingly, comparable,
comparable, and different kinds of things.
So I identified with them, and I couldn't bear to hear me getting good
press from the Secretary of State and from others on the grounds that my motives were
different.
And for example, you mentioned some of the specifics here.
Well, Ellsberg just put out information that was historical,
three years old at the most recent.
Well, that's because I didn't have the most recent.
If I had had the current documents, I would not have bothered to put out history.
My interest was not in setting the record straight,
my interest was in ending an ongoing war, helping to end an ongoing war.
And for that, I would much have preferred to put out current documents,
which I, at that moment, didn't have access to.
Very few people did in the government, even in the White House.
It was a big secret, what Nixon was really up to, including nuclear threats.
And I hoped that my documents would show a pattern that extended into the present.
And I failed.
Hardly anybody was willing to extrapolate and say, well,
Ellsberg has shown that four previous presidents lied in the same way,
escalated in the same way, made the same kind of secret threats.
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.
But it ended with those, it ended before Nixon.
So I thought maybe they'll figure out that maybe the current president
is doing the same.
No, it took documents, and I didn't have that.
So for years, I've been saying to people, it's gotta be with documents,
even though that increases the risk.
Well, people know that, basically, but they weren't willing to take the risk,
I'm sorry to say, and couldn't do it anonymously.
So then Manning came out with his millions,
hundreds of thousands, actually, of cables.
And then you, with documents.
And it's like Mordecai Venunu in Israel, with photographs,
that Israel had a nuclear program, and even an H-bomb,
that they weren't willing to admit.
And it took those documents, which took the risk.
So what I was saying is, I saw right away, without having met you,
without having met Manning, that this is someone who I identify with.
And at the same time, new heroes.
He said, what was my feeling when I heard Snowden's name?
I said, well, I have a new hero now.
And so, thank you.
Thank you.
If I could actually follow up on that,
I think there's a really important point there
that hasn't been real well addressed in the media.
And that was, you said you acted,
you know, not to reveal a specific illegality,
but to end a war,
to basically correct failures of policies that were costing lives,
that were costing us the future of our country,
at a critical moment, where things could be changed,
where we could step back, sort of from the brink,
and enjoy a better society.
And I think people need to remember that these stories
that are being published by journalists,
the journalists are working together with their editors,
with their institutions,
to really analyze whether these things are in the public interest,
whether they will benefit us as a society to know,
and not publish things that are just, you know, gossip,
or they don't have a significant justification
for going to the public domain.
Since these stories were revealed,
we did, we not only learned sort of the new truth of our world,
about the fact that all of our communications
are being intercepted, collected, analyzed, and stored automatically.
And that means that all of our ideas, all of our thoughts,
all of our expressions, all of our associations,
who we talk to, who we meet, who we love, who we hate,
all of these things are now subordinated to the officials,
to the policies of a few guys behind closed doors.
And we don't know, we can't hold them to account.
They don't answer to us.
They don't even answer to the full body of Congress.
There are only eight members in Congress,
they're called the Gang of Eight,
who get fully briefed on these intelligence programs.
And interestingly, the intelligence committees
that are supposed to oversee these programs,
these guys who have access to classified information,
they receive more money from, actually all of them,
every single member of this committee receives money
from the top 20 intelligence companies in the United States.
And they also receive more money from these companies
than any other members in Congress.
In fact, a single one of these congressmen,
his name is Dutch Ruppersberger,
received over 350 grand from these companies alone.
That's not all of his donations,
that's just from these top 20 companies.
So when we think about the revelations,
when we think about the fact that we've learned
what's going on, when we have an ability to debate it,
when we have the ability to correct this overreach,
when we have the ability to protest
unconstitutional activities that never should have begun,
but we also have a broader civic understanding
of how our government works.
We see that the most senior officials in government
have been lying under oath,
they've been making false statements to Congress,
for example, James Clapper, but not just Congress,
it's not just the lies we know of,
there are other ones that didn't get as much attention.
For example, the Department of Justice,
the Solicitor General of the United States,
he lied to the Supreme Court twice, in writing,
and it was in the New York Times.
But you know, this didn't become the front page news
that persists and we respond to,
but it was a direct revelation
that came out on the newspaper on June 7th,
was when we found out that people had been surveilled.
To dial back, because it gets technical
in terms of surveillance authorities,
what happened is the government
was using warrantless surveillance to collect evidence
to justify warrant applications for warranted surveillance.
That's a violation of both the Fourth and the Fifth Amendment
for people who are keeping score.
And what's interesting is,
they didn't report this to the courts
and they didn't report this to defendants,
but then they later told the Supreme Court that they were,
and it turned out that was untrue.
If we don't know these kind of things,
we don't know our government.
We have to be able to know not just what governments do,
but how they act, in order to decide how closely
we need to scrutinize their behaviors.
And if we didn't have whistleblowers like you,
like Tom Drake, and like everybody else
who's come forward at tremendous risks,
we would have a less open, less free,
and less accountable society.
And because of that, I think it's worth
taking risks to do this.
And it's not just what's illegal.
The scandal is what is legal.
The scandal is what's happening every day,
the unconstitutional activities
that are still occurring right now.
Wise words from Edward Snowden,
Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas Drake.
That was one of the many keynote talks you could get.
If you go to give2wbai.org,
or call 516-620-3602
with a pledge of $75 or more,
and ask for the Hope Conference Keynote Series flash drive,
or the Hope Conference Keynote Series DVDs,
and yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on there.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that.
But while we've got everyone here,
we can talk some more about PumpCon
and just some of the particular things
you might have seen there that particularly inspired you,
or that you thought was worth the trip.
Well.
Jim, in the off-the-hook studio audience.
There was one talk, SIGINT on a budget,
where they took a Raspberry Pi
and collected pager data in midtown Manhattan.
I thought that talk was very interesting.
Excellent.
Were you familiar with the subject beforehand,
or coming to it?
No, I was new to it,
but it was a very well done talk
with a lot of content that was good.
Very cool.
Telefonica, what would you say was one that particularly?
I would say the same.
That was actually a very good talk,
and very well presented.
And even if you were not familiar
with the subject matter,
it still drew you to it,
and made you ask questions,
and just now I want to go more into it, actually.
So it was a very good talk, I would have to say that.
Excellent.
How about you, Night Owl?
I unfortunately missed quite a lot of the talks
as I was running around,
catching up with people that I generally don't get to see,
including Bernie S., who happened to be there,
laying some plans for hope.
Excellent, yep.
We're cranking away on hope behind the scenes.
Check out hope.net,
where events will unfold,
or hopeconf on Twitter.
Meanwhile, there's a lot of other stuff going on this week,
and some news I'd like to get to.
And on a subject that I know is very close to your heart,
Night Owl,
Amazon Key is something that people
have been talking about lately.
This is a new service that will let Amazon couriers
unlock your front door for you.
This has been posted about all over the place,
but this particular story is on The Verge,
and it describes it as relying on Amazon's new Cloud Cam
and a compatible smart lock.
Now, this camera is the hub,
and it connects to the internet via your Wi-Fi,
and the camera talks to the lock over Zigbee,
a wireless protocol used by many IoT devices.
And when a courier arrives,
an Amazon courier arrives with an Amazon package for you.
They scan the barcode, which sends a request to Amazon.
If everything checks out,
the Amazon Cloud will grant permission
to unlock your front door to their courier.
The courier can swipe the screen, unlock your door,
they can drop off your package for you,
relock your door with another swipe on their screen,
and be on their memory way,
and you, the customer who aren't home during all this,
will get a notification that your delivery has arrived.
Now, this is special, I think,
for so many reasons to us here,
but Nihal, why don't you tell us what you think of this?
So-
In radio-friendly language, please.
Yes, that's gonna be the tricky part.
There are a handful of things there
that they are doing fairly right.
The fact that they are limiting it
to people who work directly for Amazon
and not third-party delivery services is a good thing.
It's people who Amazon has some form of direct control over
and if they do abuse their privileges,
Amazon can take direct disciplinary steps
or fix training or whatever they need to do
to address those problems.
And that's good, if not necessarily ideal.
The fact that there is some degree of authentication
and the fact that their camera specifically
is supposed to be set up
so that it will record the encounter,
that is the person actually entering your home,
and that at least in theory,
the training and directives that they're giving
to the couriers who will be participating in this program
are that they should only open the front door of your house
enough for them to slide the package in
and then immediately close the door.
So that's good, it's good guidance.
In theory, yeah.
Yeah, in theory, it's a great idea.
How well they will enforce this
and how they will really go about ensuring
that this is adhered to that closely
is kind of where things will ultimately fall apart.
I mean, it does, assuming that your camera works
and is set up correctly and is pointed in the right spot,
you will then actually,
I believe the story says that you, the customer,
will then actually have the ability
to review footage of the delivery, possibly even live,
so that you will have more or less real-time notice
if they are not doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Those are the good things.
Just about everything else about this
really has some fundamental problems.
The fact that they're using ZigBee
actually isn't a terrible thing.
The ZigBee protocol is a fairly widely used
home automation protocol,
which means that the number of compatible devices
will be relatively large
compared to creating some brand-new proprietary protocol.
But it's yet another protocol in an unlicensed radio band,
and it still ultimately then falls back on Wi-Fi,
which particularly with some of the news
that's come out in the last few weeks
has had its security even significantly reduced,
because I very much doubt that Amazon
is going to help you set up
your own P-E-A-P authentication server
and create a new limited account on your network
just for the Amazon camera.
So you're probably going to be forced to use
what is the now known to be compromised WPA2
if it allows you to use any sort of security
on that Wi-Fi link.
Then there's the locks that they are saying
are compatible with this service at launch,
which from the list that I've seen
basically only includes the products
from two manufacturers, Kwikset and Yale.
The Kwikset Kivo is the Kwikset product that's compatible,
and that has a few decent points about it.
Now, just to point out for the listeners
who may not be familiar with Night Owl's work,
he knows of what he speaks.
He works very much with TOOL,
the open organization of lock pickers,
and is certainly a heck of a lock sport guy
and a lock expert himself.
So please do go on.
So the Kwikset Kivo is Kwikset's entry
into the smart lock market.
And they do have some very good points about it.
The physical lock mechanism is based on their
patented smart lock design,
which makes it very easy for the owner to quickly
and without too much trouble,
switch what keys the lock will work with.
But it does have a few flaws.
Earlier versions of it were very susceptible
to certain types of brute force attacks,
which made them basically trivial to break open.
They are very pick resistant, so surreptitious entry,
that is someone being able to get into your house
and get out without anyone noticing
and without leaving any sort of traces behind
is very difficult.
But something that someone can just walk up to your door
with a screwdriver and open your door as if they had a key
is not a good thing.
Probably not.
So yeah, whatever I think claims are being made
about the security of this device,
we can also say that that may be the security
of this device now,
and later when you've installed the thing in your door
and some really simple exploit is found for them,
then that's a whole other ball of wax.
Yet, I don't know the rest of you,
how would you feel about letting Amazon's couriers
open your door for you?
No, I would not be very comfortable with that,
to be honest.
Yeah, thumbs down from Jim over in the bench seats.
No, I wouldn't use it.
However, it's also dangerous for the people
doing the delivery as well,
because I'm sure there's people that don't think through
the logistics of that, and they're probably.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
People with animals, people with children,
people with animal children.
Who don't remember that they.
Yes.
Yeah.
So a lot of things that could go wrong for both sides.
That was actually, I believe,
one of the things that was also covered as something
that they are supposed to be working into the training
for the couriers, which is that they should always knock
or ring the doorbell to check for anyone
who is present in the home,
or to check if there are animals,
particularly dangerous dogs,
I think was explicitly mentioned, but.
Or dangerous children.
You never know.
But also just taking into account the average courier
and the state most of us find our packages in
on a regular basis.
I think this bears looking at
and maybe being a bit dubious about.
Absolutely.
Some other stuff going on.
Facebook.
Let's talk about Facebook.
We all love Facebook.
Not me, I don't love Facebook.
But Facebook owes the world an apology,
and owes this particular Palestinian individual an apology
because they had him arrested.
Facebook had a Palestinian user arrested
for posting, good morning.
This story on the Verge.
A Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police
after a post saying good morning,
that it's automatic translation service
erroneously translated as, in Hebrew,
attack them, and in English, hurt them.
This captioned to a photo of this individual
leaning against a bulldozer,
with the caption good morning in Arabic
that was translated by Facebook software
as attack them and or hurt them,
depending on if you read Hebrew or English.
So Facebook basically,
like the police were notified of this Facebook post
and were suspicious that this guy was going to use
a bulldozer to plan some sort of attack
and hurt people or attack people.
So they hauled him off because of his mistranslated
Facebook post by Facebook software.
A few hours later they released him
and police realized their mistake and apologized.
But the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports
that before his arrest, no Arabic speaking officer
had thought to read the man's original Facebook post.
So we've all heard of wacky stories
about consequences that come from posting
this or that to your social media.
But you don't even have to post that now.
You have to post something that wonky translation software
decides is something else entirely.
So that I think, it's just,
there's so much fun to be had here, I think.
Yeah, machine translation,
while it is very helpful for a lot of things,
if you need to know what the word for Apple is
when you're in a foreign country,
pretty decent chances of getting that one right.
But yeah, I actually have worked on a few tech projects
that involved adding closed captioning to video and audio
particularly for accessibility purposes.
And the majority of these products that are sold for this,
the machine translation is rarely considered
to be better than about 80% accurate.
Yeah.
And that's assuming that they actually have no issues
with matching their sample database or dictionary
for the language with the dialect of the speaker or writer.
And just the number of different cultural nuances
that machine translation generally doesn't manage to get.
Because I see people that I speak to occasionally
on Twitter posting in Dutch or German or Spanish
or any number of languages.
Sometimes it's not the fact that they're posting
in a foreign language,
it's the fact that they're posting something very technical.
And so it's all just incomprehensible gibberish
to anyone who doesn't know the particular technology
that they're talking about.
And it will say, oh, translate this from Portuguese.
Actually that was last night
and that was a post on Irish grammar.
It's actually Irish grammar
and whatever Twitter uses to translate
foreign language posts decided that,
no, that's Portuguese.
Yeah.
But this is now like, we've all had a laugh
with badly machine translated things
on the net or elsewhere.
There's a fabulous movie called Star War.
The third gathers the backstroke of the West,
which you might look for more info on
if you're into Star Wars.
But generally speaking, maybe not something
to base hauling someone off to jail on.
Yeah.
But yeah, this is something that happens.
The more power we give to social media
and the more we just blindly trust
what we think we read on it.
What else is going on in the world?
The FCC, our old, old friends here at WBAI.
And now under the guidance of Ajit Pai,
who we could, again, say a bunch
of radio unfriendly words about.
They just did something very special
to this very medium that we're working in right now.
They've done something special to radio.
Now part of the magic of radio,
and we've talked about this on this program in the past,
has been that it's still a medium
that's of the community in which it exists.
You can have local radio done by local people
in a local location and talking of locally owned,
locally managed, and it's got some presence
in the place that it's talking to.
We're here in New York City.
We're based in Brooklyn.
We're broadcasting pretty much straight
from our city to the surrounding area.
But a lot of that has been down
to what's known as the Main Studio Rule.
This was a rule adopted around 80 years ago
that says a radio station has to have a physical studio
in or near the area where you have a license to transmit.
So we've got our physical studio here in Brooklyn.
We're here in New York City.
Brooklyn, for those unfamiliar, is part of New York City.
But yesterday, the FCC voted to end this rule,
to get rid of it, to trash the Main Studio Rule,
which means that you don't have to be in a community
to run a radio station there.
You don't have to be anywhere near it
to run a radio station there.
And the justification they gave for this
is with the rise of social media,
consumers now have other ways to get in touch
with their local broadcasters.
But in practice, this means something quite different.
Now, I know a number of you have backgrounds
in radio yourself.
Telefonica, what do you think of the likely effect of this?
Well, one of the things that would come to mind
is that a lot of people, it's easier to actually
get information about widely large media.
I would say large media as in corporate media
to actually, when I travel abroad,
I've noticed that you turn on a radio station
and it sounds the same as in California,
as in New York, as in anywhere,
because it's the same company that's viewing out
the same media, the same music, the same everything.
One of the things I love about New York
is that you have a lot more options in radio stations
like WBAI amongst them.
And you will not listen, when you turn on the radio,
you're not gonna listen to the same thing
you will listen California, Hungary,
doesn't matter because it's not,
because it's a local thing.
And some people, it's easier to be fed
that mass corporate radio station media
than it is something local.
So to take away that, it's gonna make it even harder
for smaller local media to get out there to people
because they get flooded with so much.
Yeah, and also news is a particular element of this
because when you are somewhere,
you can report the news there.
When you're in a town, you can report what's going on
in that town with relative ease as these things go.
You know, I may not be the busiest journalist in the world,
but I know this much.
It's much easier to report on something
when you're physically near it,
when you can get something together,
you know, get out there, see what's going on,
come back, report and put it on the air.
So what this means is that a valuable,
one of the few remaining valuable venues
of truly locally produced local interest news
is losing basically the thing that's anchored
at all this time, which is that a radio station
has to have at least a bit of itself located
where they're talking.
Absolutely, there's a really great anecdote
that I recall about this.
I wish I could remember all of the details,
but the basic story was that there's a small town,
old railroad town and a freight train is passing by them
carrying hazardous chemicals and it crashes
and it's dumping incredibly deadly toxic chemicals
all over the place into the town's water,
into the town itself.
And people are trying to call the local radio station
so that they can alert everyone in the area
that they should, you know, start to evacuate.
But nothing goes out over the radio.
It still keeps playing the top 40 playlist
because there's no one actually at the local radio station.
It's just rebroadcasting the exact same piped in
clear channel radio station that was prerecorded
a week before somewhere hundreds of miles away.
And there was no other comparable local media.
And so nothing got out and people didn't evacuate
until finally the emergency broadcast system got kicked in.
Yeah, so if you're interested in this,
yeah, I mean, we're definitely interested in it here.
We're still New Yorkers producing New York news
in the New York area.
And, you know, we're here for the duration,
but like not every place is the New York metropolitan area.
And I've lived other places and visited other places
where the radio is basically their massive tie
to their local area.
And it's really sad to see the end of this,
but I wish it were more surprising
that this were the direction taken by Ajit Pai's FCC
under the current administration.
Yeah, and in other FCC news,
if you're busy the day before Thanksgiving this year,
you may wanna clear your schedule a bit
if this sort of thing interests you,
because the FCC is going to announce
their vote to kill net neutrality.
And it seems that they're planning to announce this
on the day before Thanksgiving to take advantage
of the fact that a lot of us will be busy
with other things at that point.
And a lot of the media landscape will certainly be busy
with other things at that point.
So to try and hide what they're doing among the noise,
they're going to announce it
the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
So they're expected not only to unveil the core text
of their, and this is a hilarious name for it,
the Restore Internet Freedom proposal,
but schedule their formal date
for the inevitable final vote to kill the rules.
A story about this is up on TechDirt.
Of course, the usual voices in favor of net neutrality
have spoken out against this
and are hoping we can speak loud enough
to counteract what they're doing here.
Fight for the Future, which we know well,
seem to believe that they can still garner enough support
in Congress to try and thwart the vote.
Fight for the Future says,
once the FCC announces a vote,
it'll become much, much harder to stop them
from gutting the rules that prevent companies
like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T
from charging us all extra fees to access sites like Reddit
and controlling what we see and do online
by throttling, blocking, and censoring websites,
apps, games, and streaming services.
The good news is that we're hearing from people
who are meeting with Congress
that there are key lawmakers
who are still sympathetic to the cause
and considering stepping in to slow the FCC,
but they need to be getting a lot more phone calls
from their constituents in order to act.
So yeah, we've said this sort of thing before,
and it seems like a losing battle.
It seems like sort of shouting down a well sometimes
when you contact your Congress creatures
and senators and legislators and people like that
with your opinions,
but it's still a powerful tool that we do have.
While that still remains,
it's a tool that we have at our disposal.
So even if you think it's a done deal in your area,
even if you think your local representatives
are solidly on one side or the other,
if you think it's easy and it's gonna go through,
if you think it's gonna be stopped,
whatever you think,
tell your representatives what you think,
and that counts.
It still counts.
It counts if you call them and use your actual voice.
It counts if you write them and use actual paper.
Email and electronic messages,
that theoretically still counts too,
but most of the people versed in such things
say it's still the telephone calls,
it's still the physical pieces of mail
that pull the most weight.
So keep an eye on that,
and we will certainly be keeping an eye on it here.
Now, some other things.
While we're talking about net neutrality,
there's some interesting news out of Seattle,
where our colleague Kyle hails from,
and it's about a mayoral candidate.
Now Seattle's having a mayoral vote approaching,
and there is one of their candidates
who has accepted $50,000
from entities like Comcast and CenturyLink.
There is also a mayoral candidate
who opposes the idea of setting up
community-owned internet for the area.
Surprising no one, these are the same candidate.
The candidate is,
as the story freezes here,
let's see, about 15% of Seattleites
don't have access to the internet,
this according to Vice Motherboard.
Though there's plenty of infrastructure,
the cost is prohibitive for many people.
That's why Seattle has been mulling over the idea
of a municipal broadband network,
which would deliver high-speed internet
as a public utility, like electricity.
But the two mayoral candidates have very different stances
on whether such a network is a good idea.
The advocate who, I cannot find it,
Durkan, D-U-R-K-A-N, is the name of the mayoral candidate
who has accepted a pile of money,
a small pile of money, as these things go,
from Comcast and CenturyLink, $50,000.
That is really not a lot of money,
as these things go, to buy a politician.
But the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce's PAC
has accepted $50,000 and endorsed Durkan
and funded pro-Durkan ads.
So yeah, this is the sort of thing that's going on,
even in your local politics,
even if you're not voting on the president
or you're Congress creatures again, or people like that,
this is still the thing that's going on,
even at the mayoral level,
even at other levels of government.
So it's still worth, I think, paying attention
when these elections are happening in your area.
And it's, I don't know, does this strike any of you
as something that's maybe sour
or just the way things go now, or, I don't know.
It's unfortunately something that's been
a continuing pattern for the last several years,
particularly since the fight over
the original net neutrality rules,
what were those really terrible internet regulation bills
that Congress was considering a few years ago?
There was SOPA, there was PIPA.
Yes, SOPA and PIPA.
During all of that, there were a ton of people
who very obviously,
the only people that they were listening to
were their donors, who were large telecoms,
who were, these were people who were literally
sponsoring bills that were copied and pasted
from model legislative language,
put out by lobbyists for large telecoms,
where they were then taking what was very, very obviously
a bill written to protect these entrenched companies
that had no interest in working for the consumer
or working for the population.
And then just labeling them as consumer protection acts.
Yeah, it's all pretty amazing.
Yeah, we'll be keeping an eye on this.
And Jenny Durkan is the name of the mayoral candidate
who doesn't think that community-owned internet
would be a good idea when you could go with things
like Comcast and CenturyLink,
who just so happened to give her,
I guess, mid-sized pile of money.
There are several groups now
that are trying to overturn,
they're trying to negate the effects of Citizens United
by adding a new amendment through Congress.
There's two groups that are really working
at the grassroots level for local candidates.
I'm trying to remember the name.
It'll come back to me, sorry.
No worries, but yeah, so this is going on and it's a-
Oh, there's brand new Congress, Wolfpack.
Those are both two groups that are fighting
to overturn Citizens United,
and that's the fundamental underlying problem.
And yeah, so we'll keep an eye on this.
We'll tell you what's going on as it goes on.
We're running a little low on time,
but I just wanna reiterate again,
this is a fundraising episode.
We are raising funds, and it is more vital than ever
that we get the support of listeners like you
who are the only thing that's ever kept
this station on the air.
We have never taken payment for an advertisement.
We have never had so much as the smallest inkling
to tell you what brand of beverage you should drink
or what kind of clothing you should wear
or what kind of vehicle you should drive.
This is the only thing that keeps us online
is what we're doing right now
is asking you, the listeners, for help.
And you can do that by going to give2wbai.org
or calling 516-620-3602.
If you ask for the Hope Conference Keynote Series
flash drive or the Hope Conference Keynote Series DVDs,
you can get every keynote plus some other featured talks
from the entire history of the Hope Conference,
which dates back to the first
Hackers on Planet Earth in 1994.
And you can get that encapsulated picture
of hacker history and of social history
of the world in which we were at the time
and really get, I think, a fascinating look
at not only what you've missed at the conferences
that you haven't been able to go to
or maybe relive the ones that you have,
but just where things have been, where they're going
and everything in between.
So give2wbai.org or 516-620-3602.
And we have a little bit of time.
We have a listener email.
Our frequent writer Angelo writes,
Dear OTH, I will donate $25 to save the WBAI antenna spot
on the Empire State Building.
Oh, that's cool.
Thank you, Angelo.
Oh, it goes on, if during your show,
oh, and he writes a bunch of other stuff here,
which is not exactly, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun,
but I have a better idea for Angelo and other Angelos
that may be listening out there.
Maybe donate to save the WBAI antenna spot
on the Empire State Building,
because what we're doing here is important enough
for you to react to in such a way.
It's important enough for you to listen to,
to make part of your life, to invite into your home,
into your audio devices, into your ears, into your life.
And you think that's maybe something
that's worth preserving.
You think that's maybe something that's worth continuing,
because if we lost this, we would not get it back.
The existence of this place is a total fluke.
I've said this before, I'll say it again,
but look up WBAI on Wikipedia,
because the history of this place is such a comedy
of just random chances and errors
and things that would never happen again
in the public spectrum in a million years.
If we dropped off this chunk of the radio dial,
we would not get anywhere near it again.
So 516-620-3602, or give to WBAI.org,
and you can do what you can to be part of what goes on here,
to support what goes on here,
to make sure that we can still do what goes on here.
If that sign on the wall is correct,
I believe you can also donate by texting WBAI
to the short code 41444.
That's absolutely right,
and I should have mentioned that earlier,
but although that won't get you our special premiums,
that will also lead you to a link
where you can donate, where you can be a BAI buddy,
which is something that we've set up.
It's sort of a subscription type of support
where you can choose a certain amount to pay
on a month-to-month basis,
and keep us going without even having
to consciously make the donation every time.
You can just, I mean, for the amount that people pay
for all their different sorts of entertainment
and things in their life these days,
to stream all sorts of stuff at you,
I think WBAI is something worth supporting
in such a context in any way that we can.
So give to WBAI.org, 516-620-3602,
or you can text WBAI to the number 41444,
and be part of what goes on.
So with that, I'll wrap things up
for this Halloween-facing edition of Off the Hook.
I'd like to thank our guests,
Night Owl, Feathered Person, and Telefonica.
Can our listeners, if they're interested
in hearing more from you or seeing more from you,
where can you be found?
You can find me on Twitter at N-I-T-E zero W-L.
I will warn you that there are frequent occurrences
of some of these seven words
that we're not supposed to say on the radio.
And Feathered Person, how about you?
The same, you can find me on Twitter by Feathered Person,
but there's a zero instead of an O.
Excellent, and Telefonica?
And you can find me on Twitter at Guilefulness.
And as I said, as he posted as well,
many not safe for work, but usually it's neutral.
Excellent, well, and of course you can find us
on Twitter at Hacker Radio Show.
And you can find us on the web at 2600.com slash Off the Hook
and you can also send us email, O-T-H at 2600.com.
So for Off the Hook, this is Rob T. Firefly.
Thank you very much for joining us
for this Halloween edition.
Try not to get too scary out there this weekend.
Everything's scary if you know enough.
Absolutely, have a good night.
♪ I was, I was afraid, I was petrified. ♪
♪ I was, I was afraid, I was petrified. ♪
♪ It's close to midnight, something evil's looking in town. ♪
♪ I was, I was afraid, I was petrified. ♪
♪ It's close to midnight, something evil's looking in town. ♪
♪ And at a new night, see you sat at Ernest's house. ♪
♪ The girl's super freak, super freak, I'm super freaky. ♪
♪ Super freak, super freak. ♪
♪ The girl's super freak, super freak, I'm super freaky. ♪
♪ Super freak, super freak. ♪
♪ I was, I was afraid, I was petrified. ♪
♪ I was, I was afraid, I was petrified. ♪
♪ You hear a door slam, and realize there's no one there to help. ♪
♪ You feel a cold hand, wonder if you'll ever see the sun. ♪
♪ Night creatures crawl around the desk, start to walk in their masquerade. ♪
♪ There's no escape in the jaws of the alien this time. This is the end. ♪
♪ The girl's super freak, super freak, I'm super freaky. ♪
♪ Super freak, super freak. ♪
♪ The girl's super freak, super freak, I'm super freaky. ♪
♪ Super freak, super freak. ♪
♪ I always feel like somebody's watching me. Who is it? ♪
♪ I always feel like somebody's watching me. Who is it? Who's there? ♪
Who?
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who is it?
I always feel like somebody's watching me
Who is it?
Yeah we are the super freaks
Super freaks...I'm super freaksy
Super freaks
Super freaks
I'm super freaksy
Super freaks
Super freaks
I'm super freaksy
Who's there?
First I was afraid
I was specified
First I was afraid
I was specified