Could not agree more. Chris Hedges, thank you very, very much for your time, for your insights. And I know that my audience appreciates it as much as I do. And to all of you, I look forward to speaking with you again next week. This is WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online. The time now is 7 p.m. Stay tuned for Off the Hook, coming up. The toll-free number you have dialed has been disconnected. No further information is available about this number. 0-7-4-T We're sorry. The number you have reached, 99.5 WBAI, is now 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. One billion bump, but the best is back for worst. I hope that's understood. One billion bump! We'll be right back. Off the hook, Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle. Right here. There you are. Okay. And out there in Skypeland, I believe I see Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. And over there is Gila. Good evening. And I believe we also have Alex. Good evening. Okay. Everyone is with us. We're going to have a special guest join us in a moment. But first, I just wanted to check in with everybody and see how their week has gone. A programming reminder, we will not be on next week. So this is the last show of February. Next show will be in March. We are on at 8 o'clock tonight on YouTube for overtime. So you can join us there. You can call us and participate in the conversation as well. So any updates from people on things we've talked about over the past couple of weeks? I have a couple of things. Our intelligence is still not artificial. We're using the natural kind. Okay, apart from that quip, does anybody have any of the stories? Okay, well, I have something interesting here. We reported on the Bing controversy last week, the Bing getting all bent out of shape and getting accusatory, hostile. Well, in response to that, Microsoft is now limiting conversations with its new chatbot in the Bing search engine to only five questions per session and 50 questions per day. Yeah, they did that in short order. Basically, they expected their chatbot to sometimes respond inaccurately. And it built in measures to protect against people who try to make the chatbot behave strangely or say harmful things. Still, early users who had open-ended personal conversations with the chatbot found its responses unusual, sometimes creepy. Now people will be prompted to begin a new session after they ask five questions and the chatbot answers five times. Very, very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model, Microsoft said on Friday. Last Wednesday, the company wrote in a blog post that it didn't fully envision people using the chatbot for more general discovery of the world and for social entertainment. Really? You didn't envision that, huh? The chatbot became repetitive, sometimes testy in long conversations. Microsoft said its data showed that about 1% of conversations with the chatbot had more than 50 messages. It said it would consider increasing the limits on questions in the future. However, the company is also looking at adding tools to give users more control over the tone of the chatbot. I'm very disappointed because I was looking forward to having an extended conversation with the Bing chatbot over the weekend and was going to report back for tonight's show. But, yeah, I guess this is why we can't have good things. I think it's almost a challenge, honestly, to figure out what to say in five questions to really get it to say or do something ridiculous. Like, where's the turning point where you can really, I don't know of another word for zets, but what's a word you can really like, where you can really zets Sydney to a point where Sydney will react oddly? Honestly, it's a challenge that I think you could really rise to. Yeah, and Sydney, of course, is the actual name of the Bing chatbot, which apparently was one of the things that triggered it to get testy if you referred to the chatbot as Sydney. Didn't like that at all. So, yeah, Alex. You know, Gila brings up an interesting point, too. I think we touched on this very briefly last week, but, you know, there is this entirely new generation of occupations arising around the use of artificial intelligence, and one of those is the AI prompter, somebody who asks the right questions of an artificial intelligence in order to generate the right type of response in the right fashion and the right style. And I think to do it iteratively, it's a form of, you know, in a weird sense, it kind of reminds me a bit of, like, the Socratic method in law school, and where, you know, every question is going to come back, you know, with an answer, and then another question, another question. And so it's just kind of bizarre to me that there's an entirely new occupation just for prompting, just for questioning of these types of artificial intelligence. Absolutely. Go ahead, Kyle. This story strikes me as a benefit solely to the way that the coverage of this technology is framed. Like, it benefits their PR motivations, I think. Like, I don't know who this helps. Like, people are asking it what they're asking it, and, yes, they're alarmed, but are they protecting us, or are they protecting their technology from being overwhelmed by us, or does the – it probably doesn't care about us. Oh, they're afraid of being made to look like fools. Yeah, so it seems like they don't want, like, weird stuff being talked about as much. It seems that that is more the impact of these kinds of measures, like you're describing. Well, we did spend about 25 minutes talking about it last – We did, I think, along with everyone else. Uh-huh. But there was a lot of marveling at it, and – huh. There's a bit of fear as well. Yes, go ahead, Rob. Yeah, that's much what I was thinking is that this is – it seems like a distinctly Microsoft response to the fact that people are engaging this thing in these long conversations and getting all this crazy stuff out of it, and Microsoft's response is to lasso the thing back and limit the amount of questions you're allowed, rather than, like, taking a deeper look at why it's giving these responses, what algorithms are flipping around like this, and why people are asking it the things they're asking. Yeah, and, you know, it's not just the chatbots. It's also the material that AI is producing, and this has caused a bit of a problem in the publishing world. In fact, one of our fellow publishers is a science fiction magazine called Clark's World. You might have heard of it. In fact, we've been following part of their saga because of the latest Amazon crisis, the Kindle crisis that we've made reference to in our most recent – the most recent issue of 2600, but also small publishers everywhere being affected by the fact that Amazon has decided to stop supporting independent magazines through the Kindle, at least in the way that they have been doing. And it's likely to threaten the existence of many publishers. That's a topic for another show. We simply don't have time to get into that right now. But Clark's World is in the news for a different reason, because they have closed their submissions. In fact, if you look at Neil Clark's Twitter thread, you'll see that he has said submissions are currently closed. It shouldn't be hard to guess why. Clark's World is considered one of the top sci-fi and fantasy literary publications. They've won several Hugo Awards. They regularly ban a small number of people from submitting works each month, mostly for alleged plagiarism. As of Monday, it had banned more than 500 accounts this month. The magazine explicitly prohibits stories written, co-written, or assisted by AI. They've been on top of this for a while, I guess. The latest deluge of machine-written submissions appeared to come from individuals outside the sci-fi and fantasy community. He blamed the flood on people trying to make money from a side hustle of selling AI-generated content. And, yeah, that's something that I think every publisher is going to have to worry about. Now, at 2600, we don't pay the writers. We give things, merchandise to them in exchange. So, you know, I think in our case, it won't be people trying to make a buck out of using AI, but it will be people who, I don't know, I like to think that the shame of having your name attached to something that's not real would be enough to discourage people from doing that. But also, you know, it's not that difficult to tell when something is written by AI if you read it, if you read it carefully. And that's what I hope we do. And it's going to be interesting, though, not just for small publishers, for big publishers as well, for book publishers. As artificial intelligence gets more and more sophisticated, it's going to be really, really hard to tell the difference. It really is. Yeah, we're at an interesting point right now where, yeah, the AI-generated text, it's crunching everything out there and spitting out a result. And you can kind of tell when you're reading it, there's a distinct sort of lack of human voice, of human spirit behind what you're reading. And especially in things like a sci-fi story or even the sorts of things that 2600 publishes, I think that depends a great deal on there being some actual points being communicated by a person, some actual measure of human creativity, human heart, for lack of a better term. And so, yeah, that's not easy for the AI to fake at this point. Will it remain that way? Probably not. But we're starting to open our eyes to the possibilities. I think the submission process will transform in light of this. And maybe examples like that are an indicator just basically of taking a pause where you ordinarily might accept things en masse in an automated way and less supervised ways. But people are taking a second look. As you read, many already have policies that are based more on like an honor and a trust transaction and sort of pride thing. So there's a lot that writers and publishers, I think, are going to be navigating together. Well, it's going to be harder to trust people that you don't already know, that aren't known entities. So if somebody is a writer that has written things before, you tend to believe that they're going to continue writing on their own without the help of artificial intelligence. But a new writer, it's going to be particularly hard for them. They're going to have to prove that they're not a computer. And it's going to be more difficult than finding the traffic lights. But get this. I just saw this in a particular story about this. Did you know there are more than 200 books on Amazon right now that attribute authorship to ChatGPT? Yes, they're proud of it. And since Amazon pretty much lets anyone do whatever they want, they're selling these books. Some have even started coaching aspiring authors on how to use ChatGPT as a creative writing partner. But this isn't just affecting magazines like Clark's World. Several academic journals, including Science and Nature, have instituted policies restricting the use of ChatGPT after the technology was listed as an author on papers. Any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work and AI tools cannot take such responsibility, Nature's editors wrote in a post outlining their policy. Yeah. And those policies will probably become more common because more avenues to generate text via AI are on the way. Users recently started getting access to Google's BARD. Has anyone played with BARD yet? No? Microsoft's Bing Chatbot, as we've mentioned. And Chinese tech giant Baidu is expected to release another bot called Ernie soon. Ernie. I like that one. Yeah. So the world is changing. The world is really changing fast and kind of in a scary way. Yes, Alex. You know, as we've talked about a bit on the show, I started teaching recently over at King's College in London. I've been going through dissertation outlines from the students over the last couple of weeks. And I have to tell you, I haven't seen anything that, to me, looks like it was generated by some kind of artificial intelligence. I really don't. I feel like at least our students are scared enough of using that kind of thing and being detected that they haven't done it yet. But then again, I'm only graded in portfool. Oh, Alex. You poor fool. You don't know, do you? Maybe. They're so much more sophisticated than you give them credit for. You're probably right. You're probably right. Over there in England right now, they are rolling on the floor. But no, it's great. Every professor must be living in complete fear of this. You know, it's, you know, and there's a lot of guides out there that will, you know, show you how you can detect, you know, use of chat GPT. And it very often attributes quotes wrong or gets certain positions wrong when you're attributing quotes. So, you know, those sort of secondary sources. Yeah, but you know what, Alex, I used one of those tools. I used one of those tools a couple of weeks ago that purported to tell you if something was created by artificial intelligence. And I fed our latest editorial into it. And it said it was written by a robot. It said it was artificial intelligence. You know, I wrote that myself. Am I artificial? Is this Westworld? What's going on here? So, you know, I can't really trust those programs, those solutions yet. Well, we've always said your writing is very formulaic. You need to vary it up a little bit. Wait, who's we? Yeah, the Borg entity, I guess. That's right. Hey, so we have some activity in the Supreme Court this week. Yeah, concerning something we've talked about in the past known as Section 230, 1996 law that promotes free speech online. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because users rely on online intermediaries as vehicles for their speech, they can communicate to large audiences without needing financial resources or technical know-how to distribute their own speech. Section 230 plays a critical role in enabling online by speech by generally ensuring that those intermediaries are not legally responsible for what is said by others. Section 230's reach is broad. It protects users as well as small blogs and websites, in addition to giants like Twitter and Google, and any other service that provides a forum for others to express themselves online. Courts have repeatedly ruled that Section 230 bars lawsuits against users and services for sharing or hosting content created by others, whether by forwarding by email, hosting online reviews, or reposting photos or videos that others find objectionable. Section 230 also protects the curation of online speech, giving intermediaries the legal breathing room to decide what type of user expression they will host and to also take steps to moderate content as they see fit. But if the plaintiffs in the two cases being heard this week, Gonzalez v. Google yesterday, Twitter v. Tamanet, that was today, if the plaintiffs in these cases convince the court to narrow the legal interpretation of Section 230 and increase platforms' legal exposure for generally knowing harmful material is present on their services, the significant protections that Congress envision in enacting this law would be drastically eroded. Many online intermediaries would intensively filter and censor user speech. Others may simply not host user content at all, and new online forums may not even get off the ground. David Green is a senior staff attorney and civil liberties director over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He joins us tonight. David, welcome. Hi. Thanks for having me. Can you give us an update as to what happened this week in the Supreme Court? Yeah, well, the cases were argued yesterday and this morning, and I'm not generally one to make predictions based on cases, based just on the arguments themselves. It could be very difficult to figure out where the court's going to go. And I think that may be especially true with these cases. I think those of us who recognize Section 230 as being a really vital part of the architecture of the modern Internet were generally pleased with the way yesterday's argument went, that it didn't seem like any of the justices didn't indicate by their questions that they were inclined to throw the whole thing out. At the same time, they had some very good questions about whether it has been properly interpreted. So we don't know what's going to happen. And I think even today's argument, which wasn't really about Section 230 directly, but what's about when websites can be liable for what users do on their sites, I think was, again, a little bit less revealing in terms of trying to figure out which way the justices were going to go. You know, I saw a quote today from Justice Elena Kagan. This is pretty incredible. She said, we're a court that really doesn't know about these things. These are not like the nine greatest experts on the Internet referring to the Supreme Court. I thought that was incredibly honest. But also, does that cause you concern or relief? No, no. Well, it got a big laugh during the hearing yesterday, which is always sort of breaks the tension a bit at Supreme Court arguments. I think it's absolutely it's absolutely correct, obviously. I mean, we don't put tech experts on the court. We also don't really expect the justices to be experts in lots of things, but we expect them to be people who can consider information provided by experts and sort through it and make good decisions. So it was a nice recognition of of the fact that, you know, that that they don't they're not going to understand the technology to the extent that technologists understand it, you know, and really inviting the lawyers. Like, how do you explain this to a way us to a way that we can understand to make sure we make the right decision? So I was wondering, I heard that how for how long she was saving that line. I mean, they've considered lots of technology cases over the years and she'd saved it for yesterday's hearings. Wow. Yes, go ahead. Yeah, David, and welcome to the show. I think this is your your first time on WBAI. Right. We've had many of your colleagues on from the EFF. But, you know, welcome to and I believe that you're a professor as well. Right. You teach First Amendment laws. Right. At San Francisco, University of San Francisco. Yes, I do. I teach a First Amendment class at University of San Francisco law school. Fantastic. Well, welcome to the home of FCC versus Pacifica. And we're glad to have you here. The what I wanted to get into with you here is, you know, the facts of these cases and Google and Gonzalez v. Google in particular. Do you want to let our listeners know in what context this case arose? Because to me, I think it's really fascinating. The Section 230 issues are obviously really heavy. They're very important to our listener base. They're very important to the Internet and how it evolves. But, you know, this Google v. Gonzalez case, you know, arose in the context of terrorism. So could you. Yeah. So both of the cases, both the Google case, which was Google versus Gonzalez versus Google, which was heard on Tuesday. Then Twitter versus Tamna, which was heard this morning. Both arise out of both examine the question ultimately of to what extent can online services be liable for terrorism attacks? And the allegations are that the terrorists used the online services for planning or to meet each other or to recruit cohorts or things or things like that. Gonzalez versus Google. These things are very tragic. I mean, the incidents that happened are tragic. People were murdered. And so it's as much light as we make about some of the issues involved. These are awful tragedies at the heart of these things. Gonzalez was a victim of the Paris nightclub, Paris nightclub shooting. And the allegation there in that case is that YouTube assisted in the recruitment of terrorists by promoting to certain users videos of the of the of the organizers of the terrorist organizers. And so that was that was that was that was the that was the allegation there in the in the Twitter versus Tamna case, which is based on a different nightclub shooting. They the allegation was that they used Twitter in order to communicate among each other and and plan. And so both are saying or basically saying there are certain things that the services do for everybody. Right. They they they provide ways for everybody to meet and plan and they provide suggestions, recommendations for everybody, no matter what their likes or dislikes might be. And can they be held liable for terrorism acts because certain users, you know, the allegation goes, use these and the resulted in these awful tragedies. Yeah. And and what what's interesting is that this content promotion. Right. So do you know if if at least in Gonzales, did the did the terrorists ever acknowledge that they watched any of these YouTube videos? I don't I don't think so. I don't even think that's an allegation, the complaint. And it's it's it's you know, the I I think the idea is that the the complaint alleged that the sort of the general buildup and structure of of the of the entity and those who made the attack sort of were were fermented by the suggestion algorithm. algorithm. I don't I don't I don't know whether they made specific allegations that the actual perpetrators, you watch the videos. Actually, I don't know if they would have had to have made that allegation. But it's true. I mean, I think there's a lot of you there's the Section 230 issues of whether you have to defend the lawsuit at all. And then there's the question of if you're going to defend it, you know, is this is the service provided? And the tragic result is there just is it too attenuated for to hold someone legally liable? I think that's a question both under the statute JASTA, which is the statute that allows these civil lawsuits, as well as under the First Amendment. To what extent does you just being a communications services provider? To what extent does the First Amendment protect your ability to to enable other people to communicate? Yeah. On that note, as I just came in for a second, on that note, the First Amendment is obviously an American thing. How does this work if the company is in a different country? We wouldn't have this this kind of lawsuit going on. It would be something else, wouldn't it? Yeah. Well, so and and and Section 230, this idea that for most for many claims, for a lot of legal claims that online intermediaries are immune from when the liability is founded on the speech of others is is a you is an American concept as well. We don't in other parts of the world. There are different schemes for intermediary liability. And let me just tell you right now that no one is happy with any of them. So it's not like as much as people complain about Section 230. There's not like a model out there in the world that is addressing everybody's concerns. Right. This is a this is a difficult area. But yeah, it would have it mean and the statutes are uniquely American statutes. So you have a much different result if this was heard in a in a different in a different court. This does really present sort of several intersections of of, you know, things that are that are fairly unique to American law. Yeah. Yeah. And what was fascinating to me, too, is that, you know, as this case wound its way up through the appellate process, started in I think it was Northern District of California and then went into the Ninth Circuit and then went into the into the Supreme Court. And, you know, as it hit the Ninth Circuit, the the big platforms won. But there were there was some dissent among the ranks there. And and those dissenting opinions I thought were were fascinating in that. And I think this is the reason why the case got to the Supreme Court is because in as much as it's about content and it's about publication, it's about how far Section 230 can go to protect these platforms. And and in particular, does it shield them from the consequences of their algorithms? And so these algorithms that are content promotion algorithms, right, you know, people, they they upload tons and tons of video to to YouTube every single day. It's like every minute or something is 500 hours of videos, you know, going up to YouTube, which is, you know, is extraordinary. But to recommend that video, those videos rather to other people, you have to have this content promotion algorithm. And what and here's where I want to push back for a second, David, and get your views on this, because we have a lot of instances in the past where we we can point to specific problems. We can look at places like Myanmar and we can say, God damn, there was some real big problems. You know, digital violence spilled over into physical violence in places like Myanmar and Burma. We know that this has happened in places like East Africa. We've seen election interference, possibly even resulting in the election of Donald Trump in the United States of America in 2016. And so we know that these algorithms can be used and abused and we know that they can have these foreseeable consequences that are absolutely horrible. So, in a sense, should – well, let me also add one more premise to this argument before I come to some kind of question. But who created these algorithms? They were created by these technology platforms, right? We're not talking about, you know, some kind of bulletin board system, you know, where somebody's just uploading content and others are going and looking at it and curating it. They're pushing it out. They're promoting this content and the big platforms created these algorithms. So, if there are these foreseeable consequences that are harmful, not just to one people, but let's say to entire populations, is it not going too far to have Section 230 provide them this measure of immunity? Well, so I think there's two questions in there. One is what should the law be? Like what if Congress is going to amend or rewrite 230, what should it do? And then there's a separate question, which is what the court considered yesterday of what does the current law, how is it actually interpreted? And those are a bit of separate things. But we can even just talk about this from a policy perspective, right? I mean what do we want – where do we want liability to be placed? And it's true with any immunity, you know, any immunity just means that someone under some situation where they might otherwise be legally liable, they're not going to be liable. So, that's what immunity means. It doesn't mean Section 230 and other immunities apply both to good lawsuits and bad ones, right? I mean, and so they protect people from meritless lawsuits, but they also shield them from lawsuits that otherwise might have had merit. So, there's always going to be a tradeoff. Whenever we have immunity in the law, and we have lots of them in many different forms, we're always making a tradeoff. There's some people who aren't going to be protected, who are going to lose the legal relief that they otherwise would have been entitled to. So, our question is what are we gaining by having it? And the decision that Congress made in 1996 was that the internet, given how interactive it was and how open it was for all users and how ungated it was, was going to be unworkable under our present system, which allow – under which people otherwise are liable if they – if they – what they called republished what someone else said. You know, so if you said – if you were just speaking with someone and you said, well, Alex told me X and what Alex statement was harmful, that I – repeating that could – I would bear legal liability. It was thought that, well, that just won't work under the internet, right? I mean, we have all these layers of intermediaries that push people's information along. We have all these people speaking. The volume of this stuff is so great. And so they made the decision to create the immunity. And again, what that means is that there's going to be some harms that don't get addressed. So we do have to look at, well, what is – what are the alternatives to doing this? How can we still preserve an internet that's fairly accessible to people without a ton of money and without a ton of technological expertise? If we care about user-generated content, how do – what legal protections do we give people who help distribute user-generated content? Because under the law, without 230, they had very, very little protection. So if we want to have user-generated, how do we do that? And so, I mean, those, I think, are important questions. I find that I'm looking at – that I actually – the immunity system is a really good one, is a really good system. And I don't know of all the ones I see around the world that there's one that's working better. There's not a one that really decreases the harms as much, and we start to see very drastic restrictions on speech. Well, you know, with that, too, you know, one's a – this was a – it's fairly old law, you know, as technology goes. I mean, you know, we're – at the time the Section 230 was passed, you know, we were talking about websites like AOL and, you know, where interactive computer networks like Prodigy and things like that that needed to be promoted. And really, you know, we were talking about the evolution of the Internet without even having been able to conceive of something like a social media platform at this point and the massive amounts of data that would be passing through these interactive computer networks, these platforms. And so I think there's a big difference, too, between what we consider to be within the realm of the term publication back, you know, at the passage of Section 230 and what we consider publication now, right? Because, you know, this is protecting, essentially, platforms from being considered publishers, right? Because, you know – and maybe that's something you could go into a bit, too, David. You know, why is the New York Times, for instance, treated differently than, let's say, Facebook or Meta or Google, right? And because I think at this point now, when you have these content promotion algorithms, are we not stretching a definition of what we are protecting by virtue of immunity from being considered a publisher? So there's – so publisher is a term of art under the law, and it's a little bit of a circular term of art because it's essentially the term you use when you're going to impose liability on somebody, where you're treating – to treat them as a publisher means to treat them as the original speaker, creator of the content. And so in some ways, it's the conclusion. And so the – and the way this arose in the common law is that you were – you could be considered a publisher, even if you weren't the original speaker, right, because you republished somebody else's statement. You either – you wrote it down or you took something you found written and you passed it along to somebody. And so this was – so there were all these cases to decide whether, you know, a courier was a publisher because what they did was they carried someone's message to another one's even though they didn't create it at all or whether, you know, whether books or – booksellers or newsstands were publishers or if you had a newspaper and someone – you allowed letters to the editor, whether you were a publisher of those letters or an editor, even if you didn't write a word of that or you ran advertisements. So the idea that, you know, saying someone was a publisher meant that they were going to have a legal responsibility for somebody else's content. So what Section 230 says is you shall not be a publisher – the state shall not be – bear liability as a publisher was meant to counteract that. The New York Times has Section 230 publication – protection for its online publication the way anybody who publishes online does as well. So, you know, so you look at NewYorkTimes.com, which, you know, publishes a lot of content, that gets Section 230 protection, as does WBAI.com. And, you know, when Airbnb has a print magazine, that doesn't get Section 230 protection. So the protection doesn't flow to certain user – to certain people and not to others. Like, it doesn't just, like, only tech companies, you get the benefits of – you get the protection of Section 230. Anybody who puts information on the internet that they didn't write themselves gets the protection of Section 230. And so I do think, although social media sort of didn't exist back then, actually the case in terms of development is much more compelling for immunity than it was even back in 1996, just because the volume of decisions that online intermediaries have to make, the volume of user content that flows through them is so much greater now. Like, if we thought it was unmanageable for Prodigy or CompuServe to have to vet every single piece of post before it showed up on the site, that's even harder to do now. And plus, because we've seen layers of other intermediaries build up, it's actually much more easier to have to create your own service now, like Prodigy or CompuServe then, which still required a fair bit of sophistication, even to use, like, a bulletin board back then required some bit of technical. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you're dialing in to, you know, somebody's BBS and your 2400-baud modem. I mean, those were the days, right? And those were the days from which the Communications Decency Act were born. Like, I'm in agreement with you, and I want to thank you for doing what you do for the EFF. And, you know, I pushed back so hard only because I know you can take it and that, you know, look, we all agree, I think, that Section 230 is a really, really important piece of legislation that allowed the Internet to flourish in many ways. But I do think, and I hope you're right, that the court kicks this case down. But it does seem like this is something that, you know, may go down with some kind of mandate for Congress to pick up the ball. And we might see some massive changes about CDA Section 230 over the next few years. Do you think that's a possibility, David? Yeah, I mean, there is, for the past, as long as I can remember, Congress has won, there's been a lot of calls to amend or tinker with Section 230, some of which are sort of small fixes, some of which are wholesale, you know, sort of redos of the liability scheme. And there's already, you know, pending many, many efforts. And I do think that no matter what the court does, there will be a lot of congressional efforts. I do think you'll see, at least from several justices, you know, basically admonishing Congress that if they don't like the way this plays out, then they should, you know, go and try and fix it. It's just politically, it's proved to be a politically difficult thing to do because it seems like across the political spectrum, people are unhappy with different parts of the law. And there's not really agreement over how, over what to fix. So, but yes, I think we'll see very, very active Congress attention to intermediary liability schemes. Yeah, and I'm going to call it now, I think that Justice Kavanaugh is going to write the opinion in the Gonzalez case. I'll call it, I might be wrong. I was prized by some of his, you know, intelligent comments, things that didn't involve beer. But once again, you know, joining us tonight was David Green, who is Senior Staff Attorney and the Civil Liberties Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Aside from working for one of our favorite organizations, David is also part of the steering committee for the Free Expression Network and an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. David, we can't thank you enough for what you're doing and being part of the EFF and for joining us tonight. Will you stick around for the rest of the show? Sure, I can hang out for a bit. Fantastic. I'll pass it back to you, E. Okay. Well, let me just ask David, are there any links or contact info you'd like to share with our listeners? Yeah, you could always, everything EFF does is on our website, EFF.org. And there's actually, if you're interested in Section 230 particularly, we just, earlier this week or maybe late last week, you posted sort of a whole primer explainer on Section 230. We have a ton of resources about intermediary liability. And even if you're interested in sort of comparative intermediary liability schemes, you know, in terms of other international legal systems, you can find those on our site as well. Awesome. EFF.org, by the way, is the website again. On WBAI.org is our website, not WBAI.com. That goes nowhere. I just checked. It doesn't go anywhere. Maybe we should get that one. But please support WBAI as much as you can. Go to GiveToWBAI.org and pledge massive amounts because that's what we need right now to keep surviving in this crazy world of media and speech and all that. You can also call 212-209-2950 and pledge on that phone line. Please mention Off the Hook when you do and continue to listen to WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City, somehow broadcasting at full power since 1960 without having a single commercial. Hey, we had some interesting news over the past few days. Actually, it's not a surprise, but some of you might have seen this on your Twitter accounts, a big message saying you must remove text message two-factor authentication. Yes. You know, that thing that everyone has been telling you to do when our Twitter is telling you to undo it because only people who pay for it can use it. Only Twitter blue subscribers can use the text message two-factor authentication method. According to their site, it'll take just a few minutes to remove it. It's like the exact opposite of what we were told before. Yeah, it's fast and it's easy to get rid of it. You can still use the authentication app and security key methods. Yes, there are still ways, but this is just kind of bizarre. And especially the very last sentence here, to avoid losing access to Twitter, remove text message two-factor authentication by March 19th, 2023. So, yeah, you can find yourself locked out because Elon Musk wants to make some money with Twitter blue. So, it is the latest cash-generating idea or an attempt to, anyway. Basically, as of March 20th, 2023, only Twitter blue subscribers will be able to use text messaging as their two-factor authentication method to verify their username and password when they log into a new device. Non-subscribers will still be able to enable two-factor authentication using either an authentication app like Google Authenticator or physical security key. You're shaking your head in disbelief, Kyle. Do you not approve of this latest move by Elon Musk? I just think it's really silly. Like, most people, I mean, who is, like, going to this, like, level of detail, like, going through their settings and just, they want to go ahead and do some busy work for Twitter. Their, you know, their motivation. I don't know anyone who would desire this over the free alternatives, I guess, is what perplexes me. Well, I mean, a number of people are talked into doing it. So, you know, I'm sure they just have it installed and have forgotten about it, and it's just there. And I just worry that a lot of people will find themselves locked out as of March 23rd. It's a courtesy before they hijack this and turn it into a money-making feature. So this is, like, them being proactive against people who would be really put off and upset after it's, okay. So I thought that they needed them to, like, do some work before they could have this feature. Using SMS, though, to do two-factor authentication, it's the easiest way to do it. It's basically because all you need is your phone, and you get a message on your phone saying, hey, is this you? You say, yeah, you know, and that's it. All the people who do that now, if they don't remove that or if they don't pay for Twitter Blue, they will find themselves locked out when they next try to log in. Okay, so a scenario where you're not using a smartphone, this allows you to bypass that. Well, no, it's going to your smartphone. SMS, text message is going to your smartphone. Well, not necessarily a smartphone. It may not necessarily be a smartphone, and that could have value. That could have value, yeah. I hear the youths are really big into the clamshell form factor. They're coming back, yes. Rob, go ahead. Yeah, for those of you who were using Twitter, I want to say around four or five months ago, rather, when it changed hands and ownership, and the new owner fired a bunch of people, including a bunch of people who worked on two-factor authentication, and the two-factor authentication in Twitter broke, leaving a lot of people locked out of their accounts. And it was only people who were able to get in through a login that they happened to have sitting open on a machine somewhere and disabled two-factor authentication who could get into Twitter at all at that point. So the new Twitter has already demonstrated that it is unable to keep this functionality going, and now they want to charge money for it, which is hilarious. But it's also – like you would think it would be in Twitter's interest to maintain the security of its users, but now they want to pay you to lock the front door of your house, or they want you to pay to lock the front door of your house effectively. And this is entertaining. Well, the house analogy in regard to a Twitter account is amusing, but I see the point. I definitely do. But, you know, what's also crazy here is that this is seen as monumentally stupid, but guess who's emulating it? That's right, the people at Facebook, because now they will allow you to become what they consider verified, legitimate, if you pay them. And this is true on Instagram, this is true on Facebook, and it's basically something that Elon Musk started a few months ago when he introduced the Twitter blue. You can get a little blue checkmark if you pay for it and be indistinguishable from those people who, you know, are bona fide celebrities or have been confirmed in other ways. But you can completely lie. In fact, people were lying about being Elon Musk and having a blue checkmark, and it caused no end of heartache. But now, similar things in Facebook, if you pay, what, I think $15, some outrageous amount. Who would pay $15 a month to be on Facebook? I mean, they should be paying us. I'm trying to get off of Facebook. It's really difficult. It's really hard. Gila, go ahead. Well, no, that was what I was going to say, that they are building upon it by doing the same thing but making you pay more money for it. And I think there are even different price tiers for Facebook versus Instagram, which I found absolutely fascinating. I think Instagram is more expensive, which is fine because Instagram is more annoying, and that's another barrier to participation. But I'm baffled by the idea of changing these things to paid services and what that will accomplish, what that will do to the user base. You know, I just want to see my high school friends' kids. That's really all I want. Well, maybe you should call them then. You know, when did we allow these big major companies to control our social lives? You know, it used to be you could use the Internet to, you know, to connect with people on your own terms, email, webpages, even instant messaging. I miss that. Yeah. Remember the days when you could go into IRC and see all your friends, right? Those were the days, right? Well, you can still do that. You can still go into IRC. In fact, we have IRC.2600.net. You can go there right now and see all kinds of characters. All kinds of – Yeah, and see all your friends. But look, I want to push back on this for one second, though, because I think that either there may be some rational basis for Twitter's decision here. Those SMS messages for two-factor authentication can actually get expensive at some kind of massive scale that you're doing it. But it raises the question, though, that why not just automatically disable this for all of your accounts? I mean, people that are not blue check marks that have this enabled, why not just disable it instead of trying to lock people out of their accounts, you know, when their session expires after whatever that arbitrary date is? You know, it is much more secure to use some kind of authenticator app, and I think that's what Kyle was driving at, which is that, you know, that's the type of authentication that you can perform on a smartphone. If you tie your two-factor authentication code to something like the Google Authenticator app, that's much more secure because your two-factor authentication code is not subject to SIM jacking. If somebody jacks your SIM card, meaning they steal your SIM card or have it reissued to them, and then can intercept your text messages, they could then get into your Twitter account. You can't do that with a Google Authenticator app or some kind of software-based application. Last word has to go to Gila, where we have to head out. All I was going to say is that it's to people who want – they're trying to sell a worthless product to people who want to look smarter. They are selling snake oil to make people feel better about themselves, and they're going to make money doing it. And we're the product, and yet somehow we're still expected to pay. Amazing. Hey, that's going to do it for us here on this edition of Off the Hook. Again, please support WBAI, give to WBAI.org or 212-209-2950. Write to us, OTH at 2600.com. And if you haven't gotten enough of us, you can tune in to YouTube in about eight minutes. Follow the link on the 2600.com webpage or just go to channel 2600 on YouTube. You can participate in Off the Hook over time and call us even and be part of the conversation. Thanks to David Green from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for joining us tonight. Everybody else, we will see you in two weeks. Good night. We only had a moment. We'll see you in two weeks. And welcome, everybody, to Off the Hook Overtime, where you can be part of the conversation and call us and where we can continue our discussion. Kyle, did you make it over okay? Indeed I did. All right. Rob, Gila, you here? No? Don't hear you. I see you talking, but I'm not hearing anything. So, right away we have an issue. I have the right buttons up. Is there a problem with the levels? How about you, Alex? I'm here. Can you hear me? So, Rob and Gila, we hear Alex. We don't hear Rob and Gila for some reason. Yeah. Unless you're – there you go. Sorry. It was a tech issue on our end. It was a button you didn't press. That's what that was. Our microphone is muted. Uh-huh. And David Green is still with us from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. David, is this by choice or are you – are you unable to disconnect? Entirely by choice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being a part of this and for all that you do out there. Sorry to jump in, but we do not seem to be going on YouTube. We're not going on YouTube. Boy, this is a – we're just doing so well, aren't we? It has not yet started. Okay. We hit all the right buttons. And it says going live in 64 minutes. 64 minutes? No, we said 8 p.m. It says it right there, 8 p.m. What kind of show is this that we do? Okay. No, we are live. Wait. What changed? I want to know what changed. I demand answers here, YouTube. What's going on? Okay. That might have been our fault too. I refreshed YouTube and it seems to be cooperating now. Wait. Are you saying only you weren't able to hear us? Everybody else was. Okay. Well, then I'm glad I didn't say what was really on my mind. We're betting 1,000 this episode. Well, some people are betting more than others right now. Okay. So continuing what we were discussing. Kyle, is everything okay? You're hovering over this console here. I just want to make sure we're all right. I just wanted to look at those levels while people were speaking to make sure it sounded all right once we were on that tube streaming service. Okay. Well, I see the levels are green, so I think that's a good thing, right? At least when I'm talking, they're green. Someone else has to say something. Feel free to do the talking. Uh-huh. Alex has disappeared. Rob, could you just say something so we can check our levels? I can indeed. Yes. Okay. And I apologize for the misunderstanding. Okay. And I will accept whatever demerits. Please be quiet now because we have the info we need. All right. Great. Our phone number, 802-321-4225. 802-321-HACK. That's our telephone number. We'd love to hear from you. And if you have any questions, since David is here from EFF, oh, we have a phone call already, you can ask questions about that. But, David, I have to warn you, sometimes our callers talk about all sorts of other things. Sometimes they call us without even listening to the program. I fear that this call might be one of those. Shall we pick it up? Good evening. You're on off-the-hook overtime. Go ahead. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Sometimes it's a dial tone. It's a big setup there. What happened there? I heard the phone ringing. The phone was ringing, and it was a dial tone. Okay, well. We did diversion things at the same time. The phone is ringing again. Knowing this. Maybe you can pick it up quicker, Kyle, that maybe it won't disconnect. Oh, because I'm the problem. Maybe you are the problem. Good evening. You're on off-the-hook overtime. Glad you cleared that up. As we bicker amongst ourselves. Hello, Emmanuel? Oh, look. And this is exactly what I was talking about, David. Yes, Rebel, you're guaranteed not to talk about something that's on topic. Are you going to? All right. I don't know what the podcast. You don't know because you haven't been listening. I don't know if you could call it tune-in, but I just kind of listened. I don't know. But anyway. Maybe we can call it tube-in, as it's YouTube. What is? Yeah. See, he doesn't even. I noticed that. All right, go ahead, Rebel. Floor is yours. I noticed that radio station. Remember how you used to say that radio stations below 92 are like religious stations? But I've been noticing some religious stations. I noticed some religious stations that are above 92 now. I mean, you know, in my outside, like in the middle of the country. Rebel, if I can just drop in here. Yes. The WBAI, for instance, is at 99.5 FM. They're non-commercial. They're above 92. You can have non-commercial stations above 92. You can't have religious stations at any frequency. The real crime, in my opinion, is the fact that religious stations can be below 92 and basically act like a commercial station because they are selling a product. But obviously, they are not. But they still get a valuable frequency below 92. Below 92. And it's selling a product that, like, if you hear music below 92, you think it's like pop music or something good. But it's a religion. It's like, you know, they're talking about, you know. I just found out what a button does on the board. Sounds all right. If I press this button, my levels get better, but people can't hear Rebel then. So, okay, what I'm going to do is, while Rebel is talking, I'll press that button. While I'm talking, I'll un-press the button. Can you hear me, folks? Folks? I can hear you. No, I'm not talking to you. I can hear you. Everyone out there. What if I disconnect this? I don't. I guess we can experiment. I thought we were having fun. Yeah, no, it's YouTube. What the hell? Is this a party or what? We can even cuss now if we want, but it degrades the show. It's YouTube now. It's only YouTube, yeah. But that's the deal with frequencies, Rebel. Yeah, basically, below 92 is supposed to be for non-commercial. And religious stations take advantage of that. It's a real shame. Right. You know, let's see. What else? Okay, there was something else that I wanted to ask, but I don't know. I've been playing with CB radios, like, you know, like, different, like, you know, van radio. Like, I got a handheld CB radio. Do you have a handle in the CB world? What do you go by? Actually, no. I mean, not really, because I don't really go by. I mean, you know, CB, you only can talk, like, for, like, a mile or so, so it's not like, you know, yeah. Well, a nickname has to sort of include your method of transport a little bit. It's got to be creative. So, think long and hard about that. People don't really do that anymore. I mean, like, a few people on the radio. I beg your pardon. You're just insulted. I'm talking about citizens. All you use CB radio. There are a lot of modulators out there, you know. Yeah, that's true. I mean, I do. But the thing is that you can't talk to the modulators because you don't have a powerful one off radio. If you only have a three or five-watt radio, you can't hear it. The people who have 10 and 20-watt radios are not going to be able to hear you. You'll hear them. It's all about the crowd you roll with, Rebel. And I'm glad you're doing that. I'm glad to hear you're making your presence known on that frequency range. Do you have any other questions, Rebel, or any other statements to make before we open up the phone? Emanuel saying something? Right? He can't hear me. You can't hear me? Emanuel saying something? Wait, how is it he can't hear me? He can hear you. You're right in the same room with the same type of microphone. You know, I can't hear. I would have to hear Emanuel before, but I can't hear him very well now. Can you hear me now? I can hear you now. So when I press this button, for some reason, it only affects me. It doesn't affect Kyle. And people can't hear Rebel when this button is pressed. But Rebel can hear me. This is what we're dealing with. I think you need to go back to WBAI. We don't know where they are. They moved. They didn't tell us. I mean, you have to go back to WBAI. Excuse me. Where you have the call-ins and a better phone-ins. Let's see. What else? Let's see. Computer terminals. I thought today I was in a place where they had a terminal emulator. It reminded me of, like, the 90s where they had, you know, digital equipment corporation terminals. Yeah? Was I supposed to say something, Rebel? What is that? You paused. Were you waiting for me to say something? Because if I say something, I have to press a button. Because otherwise, you won't hear me. Oh, okay. All right. So I'll be, like, on the CB radio. I'll tell you when you should speak. I was going to say that computer terminals, like, there are places that have regular PCs with Windows and all. And, you know, but they have a terminal emulator. Is that, like, an app, like, I guess you connect by way of the Internet to an emulator that, like, I guess, a website that, you know, I guess emulates terminals? I guess. Is that the way it works? And it looks like an IBM terminal or a digital equipment corporation terminal? Okay. You can speak, Emmanuel. You have to say over, Rebel. Over. Over. Was that over? Did you say over? Over? Yes. Over. Over. Here. What about? Copy. Yeah. How about that? Say over when you finish, Kyle. Over. Okay. Do you have anything else to say, Rebel? Because you still have the microphone. Okay. Yeah. Let's say terminal emulators. It reminds me of, like, the 90s when I used to play with the computers and all that. Oh, and by the way, speaking of playing with computers, there's a 2600 meeting this Friday. Not this Friday. No, there is not. There is not. That is incorrect information. It's the first Friday of the month. This is the last Friday of the month. So, it's the opposite of a 2600 meeting. Right. So, next Friday, there's a 2600 meeting, and I'll be there at the Citicorp, at the Hughes Center. It's the Hughes Center now, not the Citicorp Center. Thank you. I don't know what that is, but now, people, you have been warned. I'm done. You have been warned. Rebel will be at the meeting a week from Friday. Rebel. You know that I haven't seen you in the... I haven't seen you in the... I said it at all. Do you not come to 2600 meetings? I'm there. I just hide from you. He's doing that every time. I said I just hide from you, but I'm there. Let's see. What else? It's just not a form that you recognize. Should we open up? Yeah. We're going to move on to the phone call. Okay. It was great hearing from you. Okay. I'm done. All right. Okay. Bye. Great hearing from you. Call back. No, don't tell him that. No, no. Not tonight. Because he's going to call back right now. But eventually. He'll take it literally. We'll hear you again. Never mind. So you see, David, this is what we were talking about. What's the phone number? Yeah. I'm so sorry. But folks, if you have a question for David Green from the EFF or anything about the Supreme Court or, you know, 230, any of that stuff, this is your opportunity to call us. I know only a fraction of the people who listen to the radio listen to YouTube. That's true. But that gives you more of a chance to be heard. 802-321-4225 is our phone number. 802-321-HACK. I got to remember to hit all the right buttons. But we do have a phone call. Go ahead. You're on the air or on YouTube. Hi. How you doing? Good. This is Johnny Fusion again. How you doing, Johnny Fusion? And where are you calling from? From Silicon Valley. Okay. Do you have a question for our guest from the EFF? I do. A little bit of background, right? Because, you know, hackers, we get raided, we get arrested, we go to court, right? Like, when I was in Amsterdam, it was right around the time when they finally got around to getting computer crime laws. And I met the first hacker that went to prison, RGB. And when he went to trial, like, they presented all the evidence. And when the judge ruled, it wasn't on all the evidence. He, like, he really actually said, like, well, I didn't really understand the trial, but I know you're a computer hacker, and computer hackers do such and such, and because of this, I'm going to send you to prison for a certain amount of time. And a lot of times, like, the courts and the juries, they just don't understand the technical stuff that the hackers are being accused of, right? They, you know, that was, like, the thing, like, it was hardly publicized with Mitnick. Like, they gave him, like, technical superpowers that didn't really exist. You know, and they sentence him based on things of imagination, other than, except, but not based on what he actually did. And so we have different kinds of courts for different areas of law. Like, we have family court and traffic court, right? Stuff like that. I'm wondering, would it be even plausible to have, like, a tech court? Like, is that even within the realm of possibility someday in, like, a more enlightened society where these very technical cases can be put in front of jurists that have more technical understanding and don't get overwhelmed or get into these realms of fantasy and actually have a technical grounding as well as an understanding of the law? Yeah, I'm going to leave that to both David and Alex to address. I can give it a shot, Alex. Go ahead, David. Yeah. But, well, you know, it's an interesting idea. I think, you know, sort of the trend of courts around the country has actually become less specialized rather than more specialized. I think one of the big obstacles is going to be is that there's just tech comes up in so many different areas now that I think if you would have a tech court, it actually might end up being the vast majority of cases that get filed. You know, there are some courts that at least have, you know, like the federal courts, the portion of the Northern District of California that sits in Silicon Valley, you know, that has a reputation for the judges being more savvy. But really, I think what would be a better institutional change is is just to really impress upon judges the need to seek out expertise when they lack it themselves. So, I mean, if a judge doesn't have the technological expertise to decide to decide an issue and it's not being provided by the parties, then judges can ask for experts. They can they can reach out to experts to to file briefs and explain. And I just think that has to be it's a role that EFF actually plays sometimes, but not as much as we should. And we don't get invited to do so as much as we should. And I think that that's what we should really you I would impress upon the judiciary is if you don't understand the technology, then find a way to under to understand it, because I think the range of expertise, even in a tech court, the range of expertise we require of any single judge would just be would just be, you know, way too much for someone to handle. Yeah, I can add to that, too. I think the another thing to think about, too, in terms of the expertise is that that a judge is going to bring to bear on any particular case or motion or issue, it's not just the judge's own mind as well. But you have to realize that the judge also has chambers behind them. And usually within that chambers is going to be a law clerk, usually at least one. And those law clerks are really there to help the judge make that decision, to do a lot of the research, to explain the technology at issue. And these law clerks are generally, you know, top of their class in law school. And it's what you do when you graduate law school. And you go and clerk for a judge for one or two years, and then go on and do whatever you want. And it's a fantastic experience. I wound up having a good fortune of clerking for a federal appellate judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. We were like the Supreme Court of the military. So we had a lot of cases come up in the context of courts, Marshall, and technology on ships, and privacy and First Amendment issues that I was able to help my judge understand a bit more, I think. And so I see that as a good thing. But then I like the idea, though, of having some kind of specialized fact finder. Because a jury is just such a crapshoot in terms of the composition of it, who you're going to get. And then both sides tend to weed out most of the smartest players. Anybody who would be considered to be an expertise in technology, if you have a technology case, you probably don't want to have that person on the jury because they might wind up actually manipulating the jury or running the jury or having more authority than the lawyers about certain issues that are presented. So those people tend to get weeded out in most jury pools, you know, by one side or the other. One side would love to have somebody who's tech savvy. And if that's the case, then the other side is not going to want to have somebody who's tech savvy. So maybe this whole notion, and some countries do have professional fact finders and professional juries. And that's always something I thought, you know, maybe there is room for that in this justice system. I think it would be a welcome addition, perhaps maybe even for just a small subset of cases like you suggested, Johnny Fugick. Yeah, but Alex, if I could just ask, these professional juries in other countries, how did they get appointed and could they be politicized? I don't know. I'm not entirely sure. I'd have to look up a bit more of this. You know, I could do some quick Googling and then get back to you in a few minutes. But I'm not entirely sure how they are chosen or comprised. But I imagine that there's probably some kind of training or certification program that you would go through about, you know, figuring out what's relevant and irrelevant and weighing evidence fairly. I would hope there'd be something like that. And then maybe that just there's a giant pool. That's how I would do it if I were designing something like that. But yeah, I'll get back to you. Anything else, caller? Yeah. You know, I was getting some feedback. But it's just like, it seems like so many in government, you know, because, I mean, so many in government are boomers. And they just seem so ill-equipped to even legislate check issues. I mean, I remember many years back when members of the law were testifying in front of a congressional panel and just telling them what hackers were capable of. And the panel was just kind of agog at what was even possible. And then, like, just like a year or two ago, we had this congressman grilling someone that Facebooked over, you know, combating cinch suds. You know, they thought it was a smoking gun about teenagers having, you know, these alternate accounts on Instagram. And how do you pronounce, how do you, how do you prevent that? You know, and they're just a lot of touch, you know, and they don't know about technology because they're not really users of it. And, I mean, how do we educate the people that are supposedly supposed to regulate this meaningfully, you know, and make these laws, you know, like we have these two cases about Section 230 above, about the Supreme Court. And like Kagan said, we got nine justices who are not experts in the Internet that potentially change how we're going to use it, you know, and we have, you know, this, I think, an illegitimate court with the way the conservatives packed it, they stole the seat, you know, and they've been itching to visit the issue of Section 230. Was that a question? Well, I mean, yeah, I guess I falsificated a bit, but like, how do we address these people so out of touch with technology being in control of the legal levers of technology? You know, I agree with you that we should be concerned that the justices are going to, first of all, there's plenty of 230 and other CFAA and other cases that get litigated where you read the opinion and it's if they just don't, they have no idea like how anything works, like even on the most basic level and that you get really bad results. And so we should always be concerned about that. I think I was, you know, I do think there are some justices on the court now who at least consider themselves to be tech savvy. I don't know if they actually are. And I think others who will really rely on their clerks are on the, you know, there were a ton of amicus briefs filed in these cases. But I do think it's, you definitely run into this, you definitely run into the hazardry of something like a Supreme Court where there's, you know, it's, it's only nine justices and some of them could be very, some of them could be very old. And, um, uh, so, you know, so, well, so I was, I was, I was a, I was a bit pleased during the Gonzalez hearing that they did seem to understand the way the internet worked. Like they, they did understand that those who are protected by 230 had to make a lot of decisions, which, which, which isn't like a take for granted realization. Like I, they under, I think they understood that it would be bad and impractical for them to, you know, to require them to, you know, it would, the internet would be different if they were legally required to review every piece of user content before it. So I think they understood that again, that's fine. I can get us all the way there. Um, but I, I was at least pleased that we weren't like, you know, we used to, when I started doing internet cases, we were doing things like, you know, explaining what a CD was, you know, it was like that level, that level of, okay, let's educate the court. Like, this is what a URL is, you know, I, and so, um, I, I, we were, you know, it's getting the, we're at least got past that. But I think the 230 cases don't require too much, too much expertise. Um, but there certainly are some cases. And I think what we really see, I think in the CFAA, the computer fraud abuse that case is where you really see, um, a deficit in sort of understanding what like security research is and why it's beneficial and, and, you know, and, and, and how people learn about vulnerabilities and systems and things like that. You could, we could really, uh, I, I, you know, when, I think that's when we really have to start worrying about the lack of expertise. Yeah. Hey, I, I want to go back to that whole professional, uh, jury thing that we were talking about for a second, because I, I did find some, some really interesting information. And David, I think you might find this fascinating too, unless you know about this already. I don't know if you do, but it's, it's kind of strange. Um, because, you know, we, we are, we're known as a common law country, right? We, we inherited our legal traditions from, uh, the United Kingdom, England in particular, and the common law system. And so, um, you know, we evolved the law by virtue of these judicial decisions and the, uh, the opposite of common law, I guess it would be up. So it would be civil law where everything is essentially legislated. Um, and, and those are countries like, uh, Poland, Germany, France, you know, places that didn't, that don't, uh, adhere to the English tradition of law, right? And it turns out that civil law countries characteristically, I'm reading an article where characteristically employ mixed decision-making bodies of lay citizens and law-traded judges to decide cases. So it's a mix of professional jurors, essentially professional judges and, uh, lay persons who are, who are picked from the community. Um, and, um, it's, it's kind of interesting too, in that there's a lot of distinctions between how Germany does it, how France does it. There's the German collaborative court model that features a professional judge and two lay persons assessing, uh, the situation. So together with the judge, the French collaborative court model also includes professional judges deciding cases with citizens. But the ratio of professional jurors, um, is much greater than, uh, than that found in the German model. And then you even have this weird court in France. That's an appeals court, the Cour d'assises d'appel, that has 12 jurors, three and three professional jurors. And it's new. This is something that they apparently, uh, created recently. It operates entirely by majority rule. And here's, what's weird about it, David, um, they conduct a fresh examination of the evidence in the case on the appeal in, in the United States. We don't do that at all on appeal. We don't look at all at the facts. The facts are essentially set stone from what happened to Trump, uh, in order for any appellate judge to look at a fact and change it on an appeal, it would have to be a clearly erroneous finding. And that almost never happens. So the fact that there's this court of appeal in France, that's looking over evidence bit by bit again, that's really kind of fascinating. It's kind of weird. Yeah, it's, I, I, I'm not familiar with the system. I was, as you were talking, I wonder if they do this in Louisiana, which is our only civil law state in this, in this country. Uh, you know, it's, it's interesting, you know, I, I think what we, the closest thing we have in this country is sort of is like the state is like some of the grand jury systems where a special, a civil grand jury will be convened and the idea is develop, is to develop expertise are, you know, the, as with everything, the limitation in the U S is that we underfund our judicial system so greatly and we'd have to actually pay these people, you know, to be experts. And we pay people such a pittance to be on juries and be on grand juries that it's, I think we'd have to, have to figure out how to do that to actually attract expertise. But I agree. It's a value we should, we should strive for. Let me just ask our caller, uh, if he has any more questions and, uh, we'll move on. No, I don't, but I've been a member of the EFF for several years. I make a small donation every month. I love the work you do. Well, thank you so much. We really, really appreciate that. We do. We are an organization that's funded by mostly by a lot of small donors. So I, I, I greatly appreciate, uh, your contribution and your thanks. Thanks for your call. All right. I'll listen next week. All right. Take care. Actually, that was our fault. I actually, uh, don't listen next week cause we're not on next week. Yeah. Right. Uh, and you know what? I, I found out that button that rebel told me I had to press to be heard. He, he, that's not true. That caller could hear me when I didn't press the button. So yeah, there's that. All right. I'll find a number. Sorry. Oh, I was, I'm just going to ask if anyone's been around a terminal emulator recently. A terminal? Emulator. Oh, an emulator. Well, you know, I, I use the terminal, uh, window on my desktop computer fairly, uh, regularly. But apart from that, I haven't seen like a dumb terminal in the wild in a very long time. I'm only asking this because this was what rebel was going on and on about. It's like it's itching him to call back. No, don't. Antagonize. Yeah. He's, he's, he's definitely wants to answer that question. No, 802-321-4225 is the number for everybody but rebel. Um, 802-321-HACK. Go ahead, Gila. Oh, no. I was just, Alex, please don't do that. Um, but the other thing I was thinking, and I thought this when the previous caller was on the phone, was, you know, it, tech is not the only field in which judges decide they have expertise in a field they know nothing about, says your friendly local woman. And that's all I'm going to say about that. Um, now I know we were having some issues with the phone line, Kyle. Um, can you just give me a dial tone? I'm just going to see if, if we have a problem on our end. All right, so we have that. I'm going to try and get a good level there. If I go higher than this, it starts distorting. So this is going to be, okay, that's good, that's good. Thank you for that. Just don't try to boost people. If they're low, just let them talk. You saw my hands. The telephone keeps ringing. I don't want to tell you how to answer a phone, but. I wasn't touching anything. Just let them sizzle at whatever. And the audio was changing on its own. Okay. With me not touching a thing. So it wasn't, it wasn't me. All right, 802-321-4225. If you want to call us and say your piece, this is your chance. Won't be on for another two weeks. And we'll try not to butcher your signal. Well, we're just not going to touch it and see what happens. It's in God's hands now. And of course, if we don't get phone calls, we're going to sign off because that's what we do. We run out of things to talk about. Yes, Gila. Well, we were having a discussion during the show to overtime changeover here at our house. And my question is, what do we think the internet equivalent of a seven second delay would be? Why would it, what do you mean? Like a pause button on, on publishing? Is that like time to live? Yeah, because if, when we're on the radio, the reason we're here right now is because of the FCC, because we don't have a seven second delay and we can't cut people off if they say something that would get us in trouble with the FCC. If 2.30 falls, is what would be the equivalent of a seven second delay button for the internet? That was my question. Yeah, it would be much longer than seven seconds. Yeah. I do think one of the most practical consequences of, you know, of really sort of increasing the possibility of liability would just be, you have two things. One, they're going to have to review everything before it, before it posts, that's just going to really slow down. I mean, it's almost going to make, it's almost going to make things unusable, right? I mean, you know, you couldn't post anything that was timely. You as a user who were relying on other services, couldn't post anything that was timely. So your, you know, your birthday photos on Facebook would, you know, show up a week later. Maybe a week would be good to turn around. Anyway, it would just slow things down just because it's going to take a ton of time to review the volume of content, or it would be reviewed by really, really, really bad, you know, automated systems that would do a really bad job of doing it. The other thing that could happen, which I think a lot of the people really hate Section 230 or pushing for, is that you'd have this, what they call a knowledge-based scheme where like, you know, they could publish something, but as soon as somebody told them that it was bad, they'd have to, you know, look and investigate and take it down, right? And so this would be like, you know, you don't get to do this on the radio. You don't get to be like, you say something and because it's live. So you have to do the seven-second delay. But, you know, for the non-live stuff, you know, in some situations, they're not liable unless they knew it was bad or knew it was illegal. And so we create this knowledge-based system. That's what a lot of the most prominent 230 opponents are pushing for. And then what we've seen that gets is you just get this big system of people to start complaining about everything, right? You know, it's like, I don't like that content. So I'm going to send, you know, YouTube a letter and say that's illegal. And now YouTube either now has to either take it down or investigate and then be confident that it's legal and leave it back up, right? And maybe YouTube wants to spend that money, but a lot of other places aren't going to do that. They're just going to take stuff down. And so I think that's what the seven-second delay will look like if we go that way. There is going to be this huge delay where it's unusable. People are going to stop doing user-generated content. Or we're going to have this massive, like, you know, people sending abusive notices. And, of course, like, the people who are going to suffer from that are, like, going to be traditionally marginalized speakers, everyone who arouse animosity and opposition from the comfortable majority. Go ahead, Rob. Yeah. As we're streaming now on YouTube, we're users of YouTube generating content. And if one of us says something right now that freaks somebody out out there, YouTube probably isn't going to get sued themselves over what we generate. That person's own ISP will probably not be open to lawsuits for showing that person our content. And, you know, basically all the middlemen, all the companies that control bits of the internet that the signal goes through from A to B, they're just passing it along. And in a legal sense, that is known. And I think that's kind of what is at risk here. So, yeah, I don't think there could be an equivalent to a seven-second delay for the internet, especially for, like, things like what we're doing now. Absolutely. Even if there were, and this is a question I have for David, and I always have this question, what's to stop everybody from just going to a different country, you know, online, of course, just routing through Iceland or Norway or, you know, any country that doesn't have the same laws? How do you address that? Yeah, I mean, you could see that happening. The laws tend to be less protective in those countries. And so I don't know if you're going to get a better situation. But we've certainly seen when there have been sort of crackdowns in American law and certain content that, sexual content being the big example under U.S. law, you know, that people want to use services, just stop using U.S. services. So I think you could see that. But this, of course, is not just an issue that, like, U.S. regulators are looking at. It's also, frankly, I can't imagine the U.S. Supreme Court doing something worse than what the U.K. government is going to do with the online safety bill it's trying to pass. And, you know, so I, you know, it's, I don't know if there's a haven out there that's going to give a better situation. Can you tell us something about that, U.K.? Oh, gosh, let me refer you to EFF.org to read more about it. Actually, there's a lot of other, especially some of our colleague organizations in the U.K., such as Article 19, go to Article19.org. We'll have a lot of information. But it's really a sort of very massive scheme to try and, a liability scheme to address a whole variety of online harms, the stuff that, like, harms children as well as all the stuff that harms other people. And it's very, very punitive. And I really, you know, it's still being debated. It's outlines, the contours are still being outlined. But, you know, it's hard to imagine how any company can actually comply with, at least what some of the drafts say they'd be required to comply with. Wow. Article19.org, that's a British organization? It is, yes. Okay. I hadn't heard of them before, so that's good. Okay, our phone number 802-321-4225. We're just going to give it another couple of minutes. If we don't hear from people, we are going to sign off. Again, our email address, OTH at 2600.com. We love hearing from our listeners, so please write us with whatever is on your mind, critical or questions or suggestions or anything like that. Yes, Rob, go ahead. Yeah, and just while we got a minute, I will mention that the 2600 meetings do happen all over the world next week, which is the first Friday of the month. And here in New York City, the 2600 meeting will also feature a small memorial gathering for our departed friend, Jim Red Balaclava, who was part of this program for many years. Right, and those meetings take place, as Rob said, first Friday of every month. That one at the – I believe the building is still called the Citigroup Building. It's the one with the slanty roof and 53rd Street and 3rd Avenue. It starts around 5 p.m., but meetings will also take place all around the world, and you can go to 2600.com slash meetings to find out where they are and also to find out how to start one near you. All right, phone lines are not exactly ringing off the hook, so folks, I'm going to give everybody an opportunity to say whatever is on their mind before we sign off. What's on our mind? Or perhaps we have nothing on our minds. Just thank you to everyone out there who's been giving us feedback on our signal quality and things like that and volume issues. And yes, we're working on all of it, as you've heard. And we have a phone call, so I'm going to interrupt the people that – we don't have a phone call? We had a phone call. That's what happens if we don't have a phone call. What were you saying, Kyle? Nothing. It's a nightmare for Kyle. He has to handle all the technical issues here. Okay. So, Gila, you were going to say something? Go ahead. I just wanted to say thank you, David, for not only being with us on the air, but staying with us on overtime. It's – I mean, I always enjoy being a guest from the EFF, but this has been a lot of fun. Thank you. And thank you. I've enjoyed hanging out with the 2600 folks. It's been a while since I've immersed myself in 2600. So, thank you for having me. Awesome. Alex, anything? Yeah, I just second that. I think it's fantastic for you to join David and be so generous with your expertise tonight. We really very much appreciate it. And we hope it's been a warm welcome to WBAI because we'd like to have you back soon. Yes, absolutely. Well, David, thank you so much. Go ahead. Say what's on your mind? No, no. Just come back any time, right? Right. Whenever Johnny Carson says that, I'll have you back any time. I'm sure there'll be plenty of legal challenges to discuss in future weeks and months. Yeah, we'll want to check back with you, certainly, for updates and any developments in this area, for sure. Regarding the Supreme Court cases that we talked about earlier, do you expect some sort of decision on that soon, or is that going to take a while? If I had to guess, it would be the end of June. So, they're supposed to issue all their opinions by the end of June. It's pretty late in the term to hear cases, to hear arguments. So, even if this wasn't hard cases, I don't think we'll hear anything before mid to end of June. Is there an advantage to having them hear multiple cases that they don't hear other cases that could really dismantle our democracy, which has been happening? Let's hope so, right? Let's hope there's some advantage. Maybe Roe versus Wade would still be around if we'd just gotten a few more of these cases to take up their time. What do you think, Carson? Should we take that call? Do you want to take that call? All right. We have a last-minute call. Good evening. You're on off-the-covertime. Yeah. Hello? Hi. Where are you calling from? Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me? Yeah. We can hear you. Can you hear me? Oh, I hear you now. Yeah. Your audio is just horrible in this program today. It's really bad. Yeah. There's something going on. I'm not sure what it is. I'm sorry to hear that. We might use our local recording to replace what is on YouTube if it's really bad. But where are you calling from? Well, I'm in Mississippi today. I'm in Jackson, Mississippi. I'm from New Jersey, but I'm in Mississippi. I see. And I had a question, just a general question. It's not really a tech-related question, but there's a case going on right now in Jackson, Mississippi. I'm not sure if your legal people have heard of it. It's basically a case where they want to, as I understand it, they want to have these special laws, carve out these special laws for the white areas in the city. If you go online, you'll see it anyway, and the mayor of the city is suing the court. Basically, they want to just carve out a section of the city, and that section would be, they'll have their own judges and their own laws and their own stuff. Did you say- And that section is like the white areas. The white areas? Can I just ask one more question? What year are you calling from? This is 2020-23. Well, that's right. Well, this is really happening now? I mean, I know it's Mississippi, but still. If you go online, you Google it, you'll see what I'm talking about. Just Google, like, Jackson, Mississippi laws or whatever, you know, and this is actually really happening right now. And they're saying exactly what you just said, that this is racist and this and that. And I don't know. I just thought it was interesting. I thought maybe any one of your legal guys have heard of it. Have you been talking about it? Has anybody been- has it been a talk of the town, as it were, while you're traveling there? What have people been saying? Yeah, I talk all over the news. It's like a big story here, you know? The mayor is involved, and the mayor is, you know, the mayor is trying to sue the city, and the mayor is saying it's a racist thing, and all this kind of stuff. Alex, David, have you heard anything about this at all? I think maybe. Tell me, caller, if this is right. There's an article here that I'm seeing from the New York Times, I think it was a couple of days ago, titled, In Mississippi's Capitol, Old Racial Divides Take New Forms. A plan by Republican lawmakers to set up a new court system served by a state-run police force for parts of mainly black Jackson has become a flashpoint for racial and political divisions. Would that be right? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's it, right? So, yeah, I guess legislators approved a bill that would establish a separate court system for about one-fifth of Jackson that's run by state-appointed judges and served by a police force that currently patrols the area around Mississippi government buildings. Seems kind of strange, right? Well, we're literally hearing about this for the first time, so thanks for bringing it to our attention. This seems unbelievable. I have one other thought before we go. I had another question. How come WBA, why don't they just charge commercials, just charge people fees for, like, you know, run like any other radio station? Why do they just keep, you know, instead of... Okay, the reason for that is quite simple. If, let's say we were sponsored by Verizon, we would not be able to criticize Verizon during our program because, you know, they're paying for the program, so, you know, they would be very upset if we said something critical of them. We would not be able to be honest anymore. The whole texture of the radio station would change. By having just listener contributions fund the station, we're only answerable to our listeners, and that's pretty much what non-commercial radio is. National Public Radio has done that less and less. You will hear things like commercials on NPR stations. Or a lot of foundations and underwriting organizations that are sometimes familiar groups of names and families, like the Ford Foundation and so forth. They're big funds that can put up a lot of capital for NPR such that they don't have to appeal as much to or have as many subscribers necessarily in any one market. I mean, let me just bounce this back to you. There are a lot of commercial radio stations on the dial. If you could tune to any one of those and find the kind of content you hear on WBAI, I would be amazed. And that's why we don't have commercials. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Have a great night. All right. Stay safe down there, please. Take care. And, wow, that's quite a story. Alex, you still seem kind of stunned reading whatever it is you're reading over there. Yeah, it's a crazy story. It really is. How is it not headline news everywhere? I don't get that. I don't know. I didn't catch this one. I'm embarrassed to say. Okay. There was this great quote that said, after the legislature passed this, the city's black Democratic mayor, I think they might say it, Chakwe Antar Lumumba, meant no words after the House vote. And he said, some of the other legislators, I was surprised that they came half dressed because they forgot to wear their hoods. Wow. Wow. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty, that's there. I'm afraid to ask this, but you said the black Democratic mayor, does that mean now there's a white Republican mayor as well? How much are they redoing the system where they regain control? Yeah, it's really crazy. It's definitely something you should be watching and reading up on. All right. Rob, did you have something? No, just scratching? Okay. Well, I think we're going to do it for tonight because we got one more call and now I think it's time to go. Yes, we'll disassemble all of the equipment and reassemble it in a new form. It'll rise like a phoenix from the ashes. I'm sorry about the levels, but it's an old board. We're a bit crispy, a bit crispy. If anyone has a new sound board they'd like to donate to us, well, we'll certainly take that into consideration. But thank you everybody for listening. Thanks for writing to us. Again, email address, OTH at 2600.com. We'll be back in two weeks on BAI and here on YouTube. David, I want to thank you again for joining us and lending your expertise from the EFF, and we'll certainly be in touch in the future. All right. Good night, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.