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And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
Out in Signal Land, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Yes, you do.
Good evening.
Well, something particularly echoey tonight, Alex.
Maybe a little closer to the microphone would be good.
Alex, you had some major accomplishments this past week.
Want to tell us what you've been up to?
Sure, sure.
How's my echo?
Any better?
Worse?
It's very echoey.
I don't know why this always happens to you.
I don't understand this.
This is really annoying.
How about, all right, well, we won't go through a whole sound check now, but I'll try to manipulate
things in a little bit.
Yeah.
So I did.
I had a great thing happen last Friday.
And this is in the context of the ICE detainee that I was representing.
This is the ICE detainee to refresh our listeners' recollection here.
This is an ICE detainee who was seeking political asylum in the United States from Ecuador.
He had fled gang violence in Ecuador, came to the United States, was admitted into the
United States and was living here for about two years, maybe two and a half years, something
like that.
But he had an immigration court appearance downtown at the immigration court.
After he made his appearance, ICE agents detained him unlawfully and had, at that point, taken
him into custody.
It was then that within a number of hours, I had filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus
to try to protect this detainee from deportation and from being shipped outside of the New York,
New Jersey area.
We got an order that protected him.
And then the judge had to order briefing on the issue of whether the petition for the writ
of habeas corpus, which is essentially another way of saying, does the government have the
right to hold this person?
Or is it lawful or unlawful to hold this person in detention?
And somewhat ancient writ in many ways.
And so the briefing occurred.
Last week, we had the government's response had to be put in on Monday.
I had to respond on Wednesday.
And I felt like I had had the battle somewhat won.
And so I was trying to convince the judge to immediately release our ICE detainee without
even having to have a hearing that was scheduled for Friday.
The judge did not reschedule that hearing, however.
And we had to make a telephonic appearance before the judge.
But it was during that time that we had and we had suspected this would happen.
But the judge ruled from the bench on whether to grant the petition for the writ of habeas
corpus or not.
And and thank God he granted it.
And he ordered the immediate release of our ICE detainee.
And he ordered that the government also had to certify his release within a few hours by
filing something in the docket of the case.
And so it took ICE about two hours.
And then the Department of Justice filed their notification through into the Southern District
of New York electronic court filing system that he was released.
I think it was at 643 p.m.
And it was that night that he went back to his family.
He went back to his kids.
He went back to his partner and he went back home and he had spent two weeks in three different
ICE detention facilities.
One was at 26 Federal Plaza.
Another one was in Newark.
And the other one was the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, none of which are nice
places to spend the night or to be stuck away from your family.
But that ended last Friday when the judge granted this petition.
And it was a great feeling knowing that.
This awesome power that we have being lawyers and being part of a legal profession can really
make a difference in people's lives and can and that we can act as the sand in the gears
here of this all mechanism that's been grinding away at our democracy and hurting our people.
Because as we know, these mechanisms are fragile.
It doesn't take a lot of grains of sand to break them.
And and I hope that that this will be inspirational for the other lawyers that are that are listening
to this at the moment, because we need more and more volunteers to to raise their hand and
to step forward and to file these petitions and to help out.
And and I think we've got a great playbook by which we can continue to push against the tide
that the awful tide that that is flooding us because of this, these ice detentions.
Maybe it'll also be inspirational for those people who are not yet lawyers, who may want
to become lawyers based on some of the stories you're telling.
I mean, you were one of those people.
You were on these airwaves when you were a kid and now you're a lawyer and now you're
you're you're saving people from ice.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember being on these airwaves with you when I was like, God, it had to be
32 years ago.
I was 15 years old going into 505 8th Avenue with you being extremely nervous about saying
anything on on the radio.
And here we are 32 years later.
You're right.
I mean, these are these are formative times and you forget how formative these shows can
be for so many people.
And but no, it's it's really it's a great feeling.
And look, some people may say, look, you're tilting at windmills here.
You know, this is a this is one man, you know, in a flood of what's happening with ice.
But it's one it's one man who went back to two children and and he's got two parents that
don't have to worry about him and a partner that needs him.
And he was the primary caregiver to those children.
And what ice is doing is is really horrific because they know that the detentions that they
are making of persons in this country are illegal.
They do not comport with due process.
I have no problem with the operation of the immigration laws affecting the deportation of
millions of immigrants every year if they are in the country illegally.
I have no problem with that whatsoever.
What I have a problem with is when those deportations are not done in accordance with the due process
of the law, we are a nation of laws, we're supposed to follow a script here.
And what ice is doing is arbitrary, it's capricious, it's unconstitutional.
And it was amazing to see how quickly and how forcefully and expeditiously really these judges
in the Southern District of New York had agreed with me on this and and have no qualms about
pushing back against ice as well.
How did you actually get involved in this particular case?
Because you weren't doing this a few weeks ago.
Well, I had volunteered actually about two months ago or so before the massive fiasco
that happened in Minneapolis.
We saw basically two murders over there, but that was really what cemented my desire to
jump into the fray here.
So I had volunteered with this organization in New York called Immigrant Arc.
New York, and there was a call out through, I think it was the Privacy Research Group over
at NYU, which I've always been a longstanding kind of lurking member for quite a while.
And they were looking for litigators that were admitted in New York to the Southern District
of New York and the Eastern District of New York.
These are independent federal bars.
And it's kind of a weird thing.
A lot of people don't realize you can be admitted to practice law in the state of New York,
but not necessarily admitted to practice law in the federal courts of New York.
You have to be specially admitted into each one of those courts.
It doesn't take a lot.
It's just really just paperwork and whatnot and a little bit of process.
But it's still a process.
So they were looking for people who were not afraid to litigate against ICE and who had
federal litigation experience and could jump into the fight here.
And so I raised my hand.
And I kept raising my hand and I kept missing out on cases because when a call comes in,
when there's an intake of an ICE detainee, and then there's an email that goes out through
this group, says, hey, this happened.
We've got somebody detained at 26 Federal Plaza, et cetera.
If you don't respond immediately, somebody else is going to pick it up.
That's the kind of amazing thing here.
There's a lot of activity in that group.
So I had missed a couple of cases because I responded a few minutes too late.
And I said to the organizers, I want one.
I want to fight.
Give me a case.
Put me on deck.
Throw me into the game here.
And they did.
And I'm really happy about the result because it did make me feel great.
It was a wonderful start to a great weekend.
So you said that there are lawyers who are afraid to testify against ICE.
Is that really true?
There are lawyers who are afraid to butt heads with ICE.
What do they think is going to happen to them?
Well, I think there are a lot of people who want to keep their head down here.
I mean, this is part of what's happening in this country.
It's the unpredictability of the enforcement of the laws and the abusive process against certain people.
I mean, that's what I think causes so many people to just turn a blind eye to a lot of the injustices that are happening here, because you don't want to be on the wrong end of some kind of ICE action.
You don't want to be targeted.
You know that there are selective prosecutions.
You know that ICE may have it out for you.
You may be a lawyer who has a darker skin tone.
I consider myself to be one of those people.
You could be targeted.
You could be selectively enforced - the immigration laws could be selectively enforced against you, even though you're an American citizen.
I mean, we've seen ICE even try to detain Native Americans at this point.
I mean, you can't get more American than being a Native American, for God's sakes, right?
So these people have no scruples, and I think there's a lot of hesitancy on the part of many lawyers to not put their name out on a filing by which they could be targeted.
I mean, if you think about what happens, too, I mean, in these filings, you cannot file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus without having your name on it, right?
You cannot.
That's impossible, right?
But yet, at the same time, ICE can detain any number of individuals without a badge number, without any accountability, and with a mask on.
But if you want to fight those detentions, you have to have your name on a public filing that will be there forever.
However, that, I can understand, is scary to some people.
It's like you're following the law, and they have no regard for the law.
Yeah, pretty much.
They have no regard for, I think, principles of due process, principles of accountability, principles of transparency.
And they are continually losing these cases.
What amazes me is they all generally hinge, and I don't want to go too far into the weeds here, but they generally hinge on the difference of statutory authority between one statute called 1225B2A and the other one is 1226A.
And so what ICE is claiming when they make these detentions is that they're detaining people in the United States who are seeking admission to the United States.
They may not have gone through the full process.
They may be seeking asylum in the United States or going to immigration court, but they're seeking admission.
Now, that's a term of art here, because under 1226A, if somebody is already in the country, then they have to be given due process of law.
There has to be some kind of individualized suspicion and a hearing about whether or not these people can be detained and returned to their country through deportation processes.
So ICE is basically saying, hey, even though you're in the country, you're already seeking admission, but the present active part of me, this is the present active parcel of seeking here makes all the difference, right?
You can't be seeking admission to something into which you've already been admitted, right?
And if you go into a theater, you can't seek admission into that theater if you're already in it.
So it's this statutory distinction that almost the full weight of every court that's ever decided this issue has come down against ICE, yet they continue to abuse this authority, and they continue to misclassify the authorities by which they can detain people.
And there's no consequence for them, because the tactics that they use to evade accountability are really varied and, I think, really malicious, because very often what will happen is somebody will be detained, and almost immediately, let's say this person, my client in this case, he was detained.
It was two and a half weeks ago. It was on Friday. If we hadn't immediately filed that petition for a writ of habeas corpus, it's very likely that ICE would have tried to ship him out to someplace like Texas or to Louisiana, and he would have been very far away from his family.
It would have been very difficult for him to obtain counsel. It would have been difficult to figure out where he was for any number of days while he was in transit down to Texas or Louisiana.
It's a very scary thing for people to face. And then at the same time, the legal system down there is much more difficult to not only access, but also to win a case and get a case to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and to win them in those particular districts.
And so when ICE does this, they're flouting all of the rules. They're putting these people in an awful situation where they don't even have access to the legal system or the courts to contest the conditions of their confinements and the authorities by which they've been confined.
And then ICE will deport them outside the United States if there's no judicial intervention.
So they can get away with this by way of sleight of hand, by obfuscation, and through these mechanisms that allow them to escape any form of accountability or transparency.
So these people, you know, they're portrayed in the media and amongst various crowds as stupid.
But ICE aren't stupid. They're very smart. They know exactly what they're doing.
They know exactly how to play the game to get the maximum advantage.
Maybe the foot soldiers are stupid. They're just following orders after all.
But there are people running the game who know exactly how to play it and how to win.
I couldn't agree more here. I mean, look, I think the foot soldiers, these, you know, Nazi cosplaying rock chewers that are out there on the street, you know, they're the ones that are making these detentions.
But behind the scenes, there is a carefully choreographed system by which they are trying to stack the deck against the detainees and ensure that there is no accountability before or after massive deportations of people without due process of law that they know from the outset is unconstitutional.
That to me is the exploitation of a system. This is a vulnerability.
And we want to bring this back down to hacking terms, right? Like this is a system.
There are processes in place, and some of those processes are hung because of the manner in which ICE is playing this game, right?
Like once you transport that detainee to another state and deny him access to justice,
that process by which you could file a petition for writ of habeas corpus and kill this unconstitutional game before it goes any further is over and done.
So they know the system, they know the rules, they're exploiting a vulnerability and a weakness,
and it becomes very difficult to operate against these types of operators.
Go ahead, Rob.
And also talking about knowing the game, I think it behooves us to acknowledge that the game that's being played is not necessarily the one that they're dressing it up as.
I mean, I don't get the sense that the powers that be, the driving forces behind these raids and the cruelty that is being inflicted upon people in the name of the U.S. government right now,
I don't think they're trying to get people to be expelled from the country under due process.
I don't think they even really particularly care what happens, Alex, on your side of things after they've got people thrown into court.
I think what the idea here is, is to be loud and be cruel and be scary.
The operation is what's going on out in the streets.
The operation is keeping people afraid.
The operation is a massive social engineering attack against people that they feel that they can victimize.
And, you know, it's almost incidental that this ends up in court at all with any sort of outcome, good, bad, or indifferent, because the cruelty, I think, is the point.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, and it is, and it's this process.
I mean, you think about it, it's very Byzantine in the sense that, you know, there's this bureaucracy, this labyrinth of administration.
You go back to the days of Constantinople.
You want to think about all these overlapping contracts, inspections, appearances, legal categories.
I mean, immigration is an incredibly complex and detailed, nuanced area of the law.
The Immigration Nationality Act is one of the most—
I'm sorry, can I just step in?
Someone is not getting flogged in the background there.
That's the noise of heat in New York City.
That's exactly right.
Whoever's a heating system that is, could you just explain how it works to people who aren't from here?
Well, it's—I honestly have no idea how this works or why it works or anything, but this is—I'm going to—God, that's so loud.
It's steam, right?
It's steam.
It's steam heat, and it's, you know, through a radiator in this old building.
This building is, I don't know, 100-something years old.
My office is at this moment.
And, of course, the heat has to kick in while we're live on the radio here.
It's really loud.
I wouldn't know it any other way.
In heaven.
No, no, no, no, no.
No David Lynch songs here.
Yeah.
I feel for you.
But definitely great work, and I'm really glad that you're participating.
And I just remember you describing that feeling of so many other people getting involved and that you indeed can put your superpowers to work in this.
And for those people already writing letters to us saying, stop talking about politics, listen, human rights are not politics.
This is something that's extremely relevant.
Alex is using his hacker abilities to make the world a better place and to stand up to authority.
That's what we should all be doing.
So take notes.
You know, this is how we change what's going on out there.
I mean, if you think about this, right, in the context of a system that needs to be patched, right, you know, ICE is exploiting some kind of inherent vulnerability that we have in the immigration system right now.
And it's a process that they are using.
It's a malicious process, right?
They've got some kind of remote code exploitation that they can use with this abuse of their statutory authority.
And the petition for writ of habeas corpus that you can file on behalf of these ICE detainees, that's the patch to that vulnerability.
That's how you solve it.
That's how you reboot the system for that individual.
And so, you know, what we are really talking about is a system of exploits and patches here.
And once that process is exploited, you have to be able to apply that patch extremely quickly or the process will run wild and affect the entire system.
And by that system, I mean the individual whose liberty is at issue.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I just want to also point out one other thing.
Let's not get fooled into thinking this is about any kind of enforcement of immigration laws.
I don't think they care about that.
I don't think they really do.
It's not about getting criminals because they're not getting criminals.
They're getting innocent people.
They're getting families.
You know, it's not about the economy because immigrants build the economy.
It's not about people voting because, what was it, eight people in several million in Georgia were found to have not been citizens who voted.
Eight.
It's not about that.
It's basically about being able to target particular types of people.
And you can theorize as to what the reasoning is behind that, why they want to do that.
It's not hard to figure out.
But that's what this is all about.
And, you know, it's an easy game to play, I guess, when you've got all the weapons and all the funding.
But let's not get fooled.
Let's not get fooled into thinking there's any kind of righteousness here.
There isn't.
Look at their behavior.
Look at what they've done so far.
And imagine three more years of this.
The thing that really gives me motivation, inspiration, is the reaction of all of us, all of the people that are standing up to this crap.
You know, whether it's in Minnesota or California, Texas or here, there are people standing up and saying no.
And that is the fundamental building block of democracy, is standing in the way of injustice.
So hats off, Alex, for doing your part.
And you're going to do it again, right?
Absolutely.
I'm ready to file as many of these as I possibly can, you know, in the limited bandwidth that I have.
But I think you always find time in the day to get these types of things done.
And, you know, even today, actually, in this case, I filed something else in the docket because not only did the judge order the immediate release of this detainee,
but he also ordered that ICE is not allowed to re-detain him.
Good.
And so because, you know, they could be subject to immediate harassment and re-detention if the judge doesn't step in.
Well, that's what I was worried about.
You were telling me about this over the weekend, and I was saying, Alex, just make sure that, you know, ICE is kept at bay here because they do not respect the law and they will do all kinds of things.
And, you know, you told me that he had to basically take a train home by himself, which, you know, people think, oh, yeah, there's a big parade when you get released by ICE.
No, they just, I don't know how they let him go.
They just open up a door and he's outside.
But I've heard other stories where people are basically just, you know, released in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold and there's nobody to pick them up.
So it's not easy even after victory.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
And this is a person who's actively seeking asylum in the United States, so he's going to have to make additional appearances at immigration court.
When he makes those additional appearances at immigration court, ICE could pick him up again.
It's quite possible they could be angry at his site again or know that he was detained.
So what I had actually asked the judge to do today was the judge, in ordering the immediate release, he ordered from the bench, and then he added basically a docket entry that was the order.
And I had asked the judge to sign an official order so that our client here could actually have it in his pocket, this official piece of paper that is a signed order from a federal judge, not just a printout of the docket entry.
That's great, but they don't even look at passports.
They're not interested.
Talk about it.
Yeah, so do you really think that's going to do any good?
I think it'll be better than a printout of the docket.
You know, it could be, I think it'll be more valuable, it'll have more force, but I don't know if it will be 100% effective.
You really have no idea.
And again, this goes back to this notion of selective enforcement and never knowing when you could be hit again by these guys.
All right, final word on this.
How do people who either are lawyers or are assumed to be lawyers, how do they get started with this?
Is there a site they can go to or a place they can show up?
Yeah, check out Immigrant Arc.
If you just search for Immigrant Arc as an ARC, Alpha Romeo, Charlie, and NYC, you will be quickly directed to that site.
It's a not-for-profit.
There's lots of lawyers that are volunteering there.
And you just need, because immigration cases are federal, you just need to be admitted to either the Southern District of New York or the Eastern District of New York,
and you can get off to the races.
Amazing.
Okay.
Well, sticking with the subject matter, the anti-ICE activist app and website known as Stop ICE, I don't think that's one we've talked about very much.
They've reportedly suffered a major security breach, which has exposed the personal information of more than 100,000 users to U.S. federal agencies, including the FBI, ICE, and HSI.
H-S-I.
Wow.
Okay.
Hackers said, I'm not sure what the definition of hackers is in this particular case, but hackers somewhere are saying they access names, logins, passwords, phone numbers, and GPS coordinates, and sent the data directly to authorities.
Okay, you see, now, when anybody who accesses something is referred to as a hacker, all of a sudden you realize, boy, hackers can be anybody, and that's kind of the point.
It's, you know, it's not really something that is left or right.
Anybody can exhibit hacking skill.
I don't know if there was skill exhibited here, but to say that hackers are always doing either the wrong thing or the right thing, it's a lot more nuanced than that.
So, yeah, this time they found people who were opposed to ICE, grabbed their info, and forwarded it to the authorities.
Yeah, you don't hear about things like this every day.
Now, one of the app's key organizers is named Sherman Austin, and he allegedly failed to inform users of the breach despite having the opportunity to do so.
That's according to this story from the IB Times in the U.K.
Yeah, according to social media posts and discussion threads on Reddit, the Stop Ice hackers delivered sensitive data from the app to multiple federal agencies.
The exposed information reportedly includes full names, user credentials, phone numbers, and precise location data for more than 100,000 registered users.
One post indicated that the breach involved detailed GPS coordinates potentially identifying activist residents or frequent locations.
Wow.
Users and security analysts have expressed alarm at the scale and specificity of the data compromised.
Exposed login information could allow malicious actors or law enforcement, which sometimes are the same thing, to track individuals or access other linked accounts, which is amplifying the risk for people involved in anti-ICE advocacy.
That's something.
You don't often see this.
You hear about leaks of supposed evildoers that are basically part of some kind of whistleblowing or exposure of one sort or another of people who are up to no good.
Now, I guess the argument can be made that, well, anti-ICE people must be up to no good.
And these are actually good hackers who released the information to the authorities.
You know, you can play it all different ways.
It's very hard for many of us to see it that way.
It's actually quite scary.
Now, stopice.net is a crowdsourced alert platform which is designed to help people monitor and report U.S. immigration and customs enforcement activity, particularly raids and enforcement operations across the country.
There are many apps like that.
We've talked about them on this show.
The site calls itself the Stop Ice Raids Alert Network, a nationwide mobile alert system where users can submit and receive real-time information about suspected ICE presence, including vehicle sightings, license plates, timestamps, and locations.
I have access to all of that, and I've never been asked to give my information.
I would never give my information, location or anything like that, not even a phone number.
This is what happens when you do that.
Whether or not the site itself is compromised, the people running it could be compromised.
You don't know.
You have no idea who you're dealing with.
It's always a bad idea to give this information out, and that goes for a lot of things, not just these kinds of sites.
So basically, users send alerts via text or through the website and view a live map of recent reports submitted by the community.
The platform aims to give vulnerable communities early warnings about enforcement activity so they can make informed decisions, seek legal aid, or other support, office support to affected families.
I was wondering if anybody out there had heard about this.
Alex?
Alex?
Alex?
Yeah, I did.
And there was, interestingly, a weird wrinkle to this.
I think we're talking about stop ICE, right?
This is the app.
Correct.
What I had seen was very curious here is that there seems to be some data that appears to link this particular breach to a personal server associated with a CBP agent in Southern California, with a Customs and Border Patrol agent.
And that apparently this data indicates it's not the first time that this agent had tried to breach other systems that were anti-ICE.
And if that's the case, if there is some rogue or perhaps official Customs and Border Patrol agent that is actively trying to breach the systems that are anti-ICE, systems that are operating maybe in a way that they may not like,
but are certainly consistent with the First Amendment and our freedom of speech and our freedom of association in particular,
then I would love to see the application of the federal laws, and in particular the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, against this particular agent.
I mean, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
I mean, we have to be, if we are still a nation of laws, those laws should certainly apply, regardless of the tenor or the content of the site that's being targeted for compromise.
So I'm not entirely sure.
I don't know very much about that data, but that's something that I heard, that this particular breach may be linked to somebody associated with the Department of Homeland Security.
And it gets more and more interesting by the minute.
So, yes, Rob.
It really does.
There's another story about this on theregister.com, and they had gotten in touch with Sherman Austin, the developer of Stop Ice,
who disputed some of the claims made by the people who are spreading the word of this breach.
Austin said that the app doesn't store subscribers' personal information, that it doesn't store GPS tracking details,
it doesn't store users' names and addresses, and anyone claiming to have stolen these details is, quote,
attempting to spread rumors in an attempt to gain social media fame and clout.
Interesting.
So the jury is, I think, still out on this.
Evidently, people were getting some sort of text, but I think we have to wait for this to shake out to see the extent of any actual breaching that has happened or that hasn't happened.
Well, think about how easy it might be to simply spread word that, yes, we hacked something, and we have all this information, and we gave it to the federal authorities.
Knowing the quality of journalism that's out there today, that likely wouldn't even be checked, and you would just print it almost verbatim and say, yeah, this is what happened.
I have done this many times where, you know, you try to play cleanup for the media getting it wrong, not understanding what they're talking about.
If, in fact, you know, if people who use that system are familiar with it, they can let us know, OTH at 2600.com, were addresses asked for?
Was GPS logged?
Ridiculous things like that, that, you know, anybody in their right mind would not give this information out, especially something that could be risky like this.
And, you know, I've used a number of these sites, as I said, and never has that information been asked for.
So, yeah, that does seem to be a good possibility, Rob, that the whole thing is simply made up.
And just giving it to the federal authorities sounds a little too simple.
Who do you give it to?
You know, which one?
And they're just not going to comment?
That seems a little weird, too.
In any case, it's generally a good idea to be very, very careful and very, very choosy about who you share your actual personal information with, no matter what side of things they seem to be on.
Now, last week we talked about the ICE list, wiki.icelist.is over in Iceland.
And we got this piece of mail regarding wikiicelist.is.
I went to the boycott list.
They have a boycott list, apparently.
And found Giant Oak.
It sounds like a nice, friendly name, but no, they search social media looking for alleged threats based on their AI.
Yeah, it's at wiki.icelist.is slash index.php slash giant underscore oak with G and O of Giant Oak capitalized.
So, basically, it turns out that they were purchased by, I don't know how to pronounce this.
I'm going to say Safrai.
The site is S-A-I-F-R dot A-I.
Digging deeper, we get to the ugly stuff they do, Safrai dot Safra Screen, S-A-I-F-R S-C-R-E-E-N.
All these non-words I have to say these days.
We crawl and index over 230,000 online sources worldwide, 24-7, to help you comply with regulatory requirements and guidelines that matter.
Now, as you know, there are U.S. government entity lists of people or companies that a company should not do business with.
No big deal, but Safrai reads social media and ads companies and people that its A-I deems evildoers to the government list.
At the bottom of the page is the legal goop.
Basically, you are instructed not to use this service to block doing business with anyone their A-I deems evil.
But, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, ban the sucker because we know better than the feds.
We have A-I.
So, this is an unaccountable blacklisting company where you will never find out why you are blacklisted.
Has it really come to this?
Blacklisted by A-I?
Yeah, I think it has.
It has come to that.
Thank you, Gary, for that really interesting letter.
And we must look into this some more.
Any thoughts, guys?
If it's the same A-I that forces me to click, you know, pictures of stop signs and things before I can look at my own stuff that's also deciding whether or not I should be blacklisted, I think we're all doomed.
And if it's the same A-I that thinks a bag of Doritos is a gun, we're really in trouble.
Or, you know, put rocks on your pizza.
Yeah, exactly.
I think the confluence of firms that are being established that have these sorts of unaccountable functions and operations run the risk of entrance to the market that sort of mimic what they do but for different reasons.
I mean, you're - without a sort of defined framework or a model around it, you run the risk of this very same thing being done to you.
I think if the companies just are set up in ways that are unaccountable and just have this sort of authority out of nowhere through their magical, I guess, glass ball - you know, they're like an orb that they consult or something.
I mean, it just stands to reason that you could have an equal and opposite firm be established in funny ways and even as a laugh.
And they just - they open themselves up to do ridicule in my mind.
I just hope to see just as silly firms if we're going to have to take this seriously.
Rob, then Alex.
That's an excellent point.
The accountability is key because, like, if I'm being told that somebody should be boycotted, I want to know why.
I want to know who the person is that's saying so and what their thinking is.
And the media environment is such garbage now when you're looking for any info about anything.
There is so much crap that people didn't write that you have to wade through.
And this is just more of that crap.
I don't put much stock in this.
Yeah.
I tend to agree with this.
And I think there's a lot of glossiness on the outside.
If you think of it almost like a piece of kielbasa or something, right?
Like, Sapphire AI was really like - if you looked inside and saw what was in there, it's kind of disgusting, right?
It's scraped data.
It's ghost workers.
There's dodgy governance.
There's weird rules.
Like, nothing that you could really trust, nothing that you'd want to ingest yourself.
So, I mean, it looks shiny on the outside and nice, just kind of like a, you know, big kielbasa that you might want to eat.
But really, you don't want to see what's in there or how it's made.
Well, speaking of things that are kind of disgusting, Jeffrey Epstein has had a whole bunch of files released, millions, millions of pages.
You guys have been going through this.
It's kind of fascinating.
You know WBAI is in the Epstein files?
It's true.
Of course.
If you go to the Justice Department and you look for WBAI, you will find a few mentions of BAI because there are people listening to radio shows.
And they're basically saying, hey, this show is on this particular time.
Lots of times it's just, you know, a reprint of a flyer or something that's out there.
But, no, the WBAI was not on the island or anything like that.
But it's interesting to see what's out.
And sometimes you find other, even more interesting things.
But here's something.
A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a personal hacker, according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday.
The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department's legally required effort to publish documents related to his investigation, as the deadline was last December, does not identify who the alleged hacker was.
But it does include several details about them.
According to the informant, the hacker was Italian-born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser.
The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed Central African government, the UK, and the United States.
I have to tell you right now, this is not your typical hacker here, selling things to governments.
That's not what most hackers do.
The informant told the FBI that Epstein's hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah.
Again, that's way, way off the radar of most people in the hacker world.
And that paid him with a chunk of cash.
And the hacker was very good at finding vulnerabilities.
Yeah, that's something.
You know, I actually, I found the memo or whatever it was that was discussing this exactly.
Jeffrey Epstein had a compound in New Mexico where he lured and video recorded.
Well, we know what he did.
I'll get into that.
But so-and-so, and this is all blocked out, was Epstein's personal hacker.
I can tell you this.
The name is very short because it's no longer than four characters, the way they blocked it out.
But they were an Italian citizen born in Calabria who developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold the tools to governments.
Something is blacked out.
Established the Saudi government's cyber surveillance program.
Again, this short name sold a zero-day to Hezbollah.
Was known as the first person to hack and find vulnerabilities in BlackBerrys and iOS.
Okay, so if he's known as the first person to do that, this should be very hard to figure out who he is because, well, he's known somewhere for doing that.
Yeah, and there's all kinds of other details about this.
But I just thought that was kind of interesting.
He was very good at finding vulnerabilities with friends with old-school European hackers.
One friend was a hacker named, and again, that's blocked out.
But, you know, they sometimes leave things wide open in these files, and you can figure out who people are.
It's really, it's a big waste of time if you're going to keep just reading through, looking for random things.
But sometimes you find something very, very revealing and interesting.
This is true.
And there was also, in one of the initial batches of Epstein files, I believe we might have mentioned them on this program, there was talk of a person named Al Seckle who was working for Epstein and editing Wikipedia to make him look better.
And referring to that in emails to Epstein as, we hacked the site.
So, he had all sorts of fingers in the hacker world, apparently, Epstein.
And this is just more, this is going to come to light as more of these files are ground through.
Well, yeah, and a lot of it is the communications.
I mean, it's based on his communications.
So, you're just looking at the sort of vastness of the world of their people in his orbit, and also the sorts of patrons around all of them that have specific sort of interests.
And in many ways, technology, the sorts of industry, the technology industry, rather, I think, is in there specifically because, well, these circles have a sort of fascination.
And a curiosity around people that have certain knowledge, and it stands to reason, it's not unlikely that some of that will come through into then maybe using some of that sort of secret knowledge.
Which, again, seems like familiar when you're talking about something like hacking.
All right.
Well, moving on to another fun topic, cybercrime group, Shiny Hunters.
See, that's a better way to phrase it.
Cybercrime group.
Not hackers, cybercrime, because they're involved in cybercrime, and they're a group, and they're called Shiny Hunters.
Well, they appear to have taken responsibility for the October 2025 data breach at Penn's Graduate School of Education, releasing thousands of pages of additional internal university files on Wednesday.
In a February 4th post, that's today on the group's forum, Shiny Hunters wrote that it leaked the data because Penn did not pay a ransom or cooperate and comply.
The post, which comes days after a court filing, claimed the October 31st, 2025 incident impacted less than 10 people, alleged the data breach affected 1.2 million records.
So that's either 10 people with an awful lot being said about them or somebody doesn't quite have it right.
They say this is the direct result of advisors advising you against paying a ransom, the alleged hackers wrote in a document they released.
Sloppy.
You don't say advising right after you say advisors.
You know, this bothers me.
The result of advisors.
What else are advisors going to do?
It has the opposite effect.
Do not provoke us again and pay the ransom when we contact you.
I don't know.
You know, it seems like this is ransomware where all your data becomes inaccessible and then you don't pay the ransom and all the data gets released.
It kind of solves itself, you know.
You have all your data back.
Of course, the whole rest of the world has it too.
That's not good.
But I don't know.
Paying ransom doesn't, it just doesn't feel quite right, you know.
You know, something about it doesn't seem particularly honorable.
And they have a forum.
They run a forum.
The shiny hunters have an online forum.
That's great.
Oh, that's amazing.
Communication back and forth.
The files include private documents that were not released in the initial breach.
That's the university donor records, internal talking points, and a November 2023 progress report from the university anti-Semitism action plan.
We are analyzing the data and will notify any individuals if required by applicable privacy regulations.
Who said that?
Shiny hunters or a university spokesperson?
You can't tell anymore.
Everyone has a forum.
Everyone is talking to the press.
Yeah, the leak also appeared to contain personal information of several high-profile individuals, including 1968 Horton graduate and President Donald Trump and members of his family.
Well, now it got serious.
Multiple members of the Trump family were internally labeled by Penn as confirmed ultra-high net-worth individuals.
Well, now it makes sense.
If it only affected 10 people and there's a million records, the Trumps could do that by themselves.
And I say release it all.
Let's see what's out there.
Since we, you know, the Epstein files were a big disappointment because of how they're protecting Trump, how they're keeping all the information from getting out.
Well, you know, here's something else.
Consolation prize.
I guess that's all we have to say about that.
Okay, well, you know what?
We're out of time.
We're going to be on overtime in just a moment.
Write to us, O-T-H, at 2600.com.
Join us on overtime at youtube.com slash channel 2600.
Rob, go ahead.
Go check out your local 2600 meeting, 2600.com slash meetings, happening all over the world this Friday.
And if you don't have one, start one.
That's right.
And we'll be talking about all kinds of other things that happened in the hacker world on overtime coming up in just about 10 minutes, 8 o'clock on YouTube channel 2600 or the link that is on the front page of 2600.com.
Until next week, this is Emmanuel.
For everyone else, the Off the Hook crew, ice out.
Through the winter's ice and cold, down Nicolet Avenue, a city of flame fought fire and ice, Nathan occupier's boots.
King Trump's private army from the DHS, guns belted to their coats.
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law, or so their story goes.
Against smoke and rubber bullets, in the dawn's early light.
Citizens stood for justice, their voices ringing through the night.
And there were bloody footprints, where mercy should have stood.
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets, Alex pretty and Renee good.
We'll take our stand for this land and the stranger in our midst.
Here in our home, they killed and roamed in the winter of 26.
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.
Trump's federal thugs beat up on his face and his chest.
Then we heard the gunshots and Alex pretty lay in the snow dead.
Their claim was self-defense soon.
Just don't believe your eyes.
It's our blood and bones and these whistles and phones against Miller and Norm's dirty lies.
Oh, I'm Minneapolis, I hear your voice crying through the bloody mist.
Remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.
Now they say they're here to uphold the law, but they trample on our rights.
If your skin is black or brown, my friend, you can be questioned or deported on sight.
In our chants of ice out now, our city's heart and soul persists.
Through broken glass and bloodied tears on the streets of Minneapolis.
Oh, I'm Minneapolis, I hear your voice singing through the bloody mist.
Here in our home, they killed and roamed in the winter of 26.
We'll take our stand for all this land and the stranger that I missed.
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.
We'll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
Christa! Vive on!