[00:00.000 --> 00:08.640]  This is Gabrielle Davenport from Make Music New York inviting WBAI listeners to participate in our 10th anniversary Make Music Day on Tuesday, June 21st.
[00:08.800 --> 00:14.160]  Every year on the Summer Solstice, we fill all five boroughs with free outdoor concerts and we want you to join the fun.
[00:14.380 --> 00:19.960]  For more information on how to participate, either as a performer or as a venue, go to makemusicny.org.
[00:19.960 --> 00:27.720]  And don't forget to tune in Fridays at 2 for Making Music here on 99.5 WBAI and WBAI.org.
[00:30.120 --> 00:36.080]  And this is radio station WBAI, where the time is just about 7 o'clock.
[00:36.240 --> 00:38.260]  Once again, that means time for Off the Hook.
[00:43.500 --> 01:05.390]  The telephone keeps ringing So I ripped it off the wall I cut myself while shaving Now I can't make a call We couldn't get much worse We would, from Diddly Bump, but the best is back from worst I hope that's understood From Diddly Bump!
[02:02.100 --> 02:03.560]  And a very good evening to everybody.
[02:03.740 --> 02:07.880]  The program is Off the Hook, Emmanuel Goldstein, back in the studio this week.
[02:08.700 --> 02:09.440]  Hello, Rob.
[02:09.820 --> 02:10.300]  Good evening.
[02:10.840 --> 02:11.600]  Hello, Kyle.
[02:12.160 --> 02:12.840]  Hello, hackers.
[02:14.100 --> 02:16.640]  And we think this person calling in is Bernie.
[02:16.860 --> 02:17.720]  Bernie, is that you?
[02:18.080 --> 02:18.560]  Yes.
[02:18.820 --> 02:19.760]  Greetings from Philadelphia.
[02:20.100 --> 02:25.560]  It's awfully dangerous just to answer a random phone without knowing who's on the other end, but we assumed it was you.
[02:26.360 --> 02:27.160]  And welcome.
[02:27.340 --> 02:29.800]  Welcome to a two-hour edition of Off the Hook.
[02:30.120 --> 02:40.540]  And as promoted in various places, on the internet and on some spray paint throughout the city, Steve Rombaum is going to be our special guest tonight.
[02:41.460 --> 02:52.320]  Private Eye Extraordinaire, the guy who speaks at every HOPE conference, and predicts what's going to happen in the world of privacy and technology and things like that.
[02:53.100 --> 02:58.300]  However, he did not predict that he was going to be feeling terrible tonight and is a bit under the weather.
[02:58.440 --> 02:59.220]  He's on his way over here.
[02:59.300 --> 03:00.740]  He's just moving a little slower than usual.
[03:01.200 --> 03:03.720]  He says he'll be here in about 20 minutes or so.
[03:04.780 --> 03:11.640]  But while he's on his way, maybe we could talk about our memories of Steve and the best talks that he's given so far.
[03:12.500 --> 03:12.860]  No?
[03:14.220 --> 03:23.280]  He's renowned for his talk, Privacy is Dead, at HOPE, and has been a big part of HOPE since its very inception.
[03:23.620 --> 03:24.100]  Yes.
[03:24.720 --> 03:30.800]  One of the first speakers and has been there regularly ever since.
[03:31.100 --> 03:39.540]  So it's always exciting to hear from him and talk about this elusive thing we call privacy.
[03:39.540 --> 03:51.840]  Well, the amazing thing is that he gets it right as far as telling you what's going to be happening with privacy, with technology, how things are going to change over the years.
[03:51.920 --> 03:54.180]  I'm sure he'll be able to go into more detail when he gets here.
[03:54.420 --> 04:00.600]  But we're going to play some excerpts while we're waiting for him to show up of some of his talks in the past.
[04:00.680 --> 04:07.160]  But before we do that, I just wanted to have any kind of updates that we've gone over in the past.
[04:07.160 --> 04:08.240]  Well, we haven't been on the air.
[04:08.780 --> 04:19.320]  Kyle and I have not been on the air over the past few weeks because of various things ranging from lack of reception from where we were to just being involved in so many other things.
[04:19.460 --> 04:26.500]  We basically took a train circle around two countries, which is a pretty awesome thing to do.
[04:26.580 --> 04:31.200]  We went from New York to Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C.
[04:31.240 --> 04:38.500]  to Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Seattle, and then we took a train from Vancouver to Toronto, which is something I recommend.
[04:39.580 --> 04:46.460]  And there were no shortage of other small train trips and various modes of transportation in between.
[04:46.460 --> 04:48.920]  We took subways, we took metros, we took all kinds of things.
[04:48.960 --> 04:49.860]  Everything we could find.
[04:49.860 --> 04:52.980]  We dove right in and, boy, it was a lot of fun.
[04:53.120 --> 04:56.220]  And all on the ground.
[04:56.220 --> 05:00.100]  We didn't fly anywhere and it was kind of a cool challenge.
[05:00.100 --> 05:00.960]  Yeah, it was.
[05:02.580 --> 05:05.380]  We're looking for a bunch of interesting things throughout these places.
[05:05.420 --> 05:07.100]  We had business in every single place we went to.
[05:07.380 --> 05:15.520]  But one of the things that I found really amazing, and I'd like to devote a show to this in the future, is the transportation systems in other cities.
[05:15.540 --> 05:17.600]  We talked a little bit about Chicago, I believe.
[05:17.860 --> 05:25.860]  But what I noticed in Seattle and Vancouver and Montreal and probably in Los Angeles too, I believe, they have RFID cards.
[05:26.000 --> 05:29.400]  And I know we're getting that in New York City fairly soon, next couple of years.
[05:29.400 --> 05:30.780]  There will not be Metro cards.
[05:31.100 --> 05:33.620]  In a little while, Metro cards will be a thing of the...
[05:33.620 --> 05:34.180]  Did you know that, Rob?
[05:34.400 --> 05:35.760]  I heard something about this.
[05:35.860 --> 05:39.240]  We talked a little bit about it on one of the episodes while you were away.
[05:39.340 --> 05:43.860]  But yeah, when they announced it, I think that we're going over to sort of a contactless system.
[05:44.140 --> 05:51.060]  Yeah, well, what you do is you take the card and you basically put it onto the turnstile, or whatever they call it.
[05:51.280 --> 05:57.980]  And whether you're going onto a bus, whether you're going onto a train, little light supposedly flashes green, and you enter.
[05:57.980 --> 06:04.600]  And either something is deducted right there from your account, or you have a daily, weekly, monthly pass.
[06:05.180 --> 06:11.000]  And the cool thing is, and I noticed this in Seattle, I noticed this in Vancouver, and it's true in London as well.
[06:11.660 --> 06:12.540]  It's intelligent.
[06:12.820 --> 06:14.120]  It's a very intelligent system.
[06:14.680 --> 06:15.180]  If you...
[06:15.180 --> 06:17.220]  You can put more than one thing on a card.
[06:17.220 --> 06:18.340]  You can put a fare.
[06:18.600 --> 06:19.920]  You can put a pass.
[06:20.360 --> 06:25.280]  And the way it works, I believe it's a hierarchy that goes to the pass first.
[06:25.480 --> 06:31.360]  So you'll go to a daily pass before it deducts if you have, say, $5 in fares on there.
[06:31.540 --> 06:36.280]  So once the daily pass is used up, then it'll dip into whatever you have saved up on the card.
[06:36.860 --> 06:37.680]  These kinds of things.
[06:37.740 --> 06:38.340]  It sounds hard.
[06:38.420 --> 06:39.120]  It sounds complicated.
[06:39.120 --> 06:39.600]  It's not.
[06:39.740 --> 06:45.100]  Once you get it into your head as to how it all works, it's very intuitive.
[06:45.100 --> 06:49.160]  And this is how a lot of the world is using mass transit these days.
[06:49.360 --> 06:55.500]  Now, what's interesting about New York, we've never had a system where you had to pay more to go to...
[06:55.500 --> 06:57.400]  Well, actually, we did way, way back.
[06:57.780 --> 07:01.380]  If you went south into the Rockaways, you had to pay extra on the subway.
[07:01.560 --> 07:03.380]  I don't know how they did that before my time.
[07:04.200 --> 07:09.240]  But I believe, Bernie, in Philadelphia, does the price change on SEPTA?
[07:10.360 --> 07:11.560]  No, it's the same.
[07:11.560 --> 07:16.340]  Unless you go to one of what's called those high-speed lines, which go into, like, the suburbs and so forth.
[07:16.440 --> 07:18.000]  It's the same fare, which is...
[07:18.000 --> 07:20.480]  And they still have physical tokens.
[07:21.140 --> 07:21.360]  Yeah.
[07:21.940 --> 07:26.860]  You can either buy a weekly or a monthly, which is like a MetroCard.
[07:26.980 --> 07:27.820]  It's a MagStripe card.
[07:27.940 --> 07:29.660]  Or you can still buy physical tokens.
[07:29.760 --> 07:31.800]  And I've stocked up on them because I love the tokens.
[07:32.760 --> 07:34.840]  But they are now testing in most stations...
[07:34.840 --> 07:37.700]  In a lot of stations now, they're testing out the new RFID card.
[07:37.700 --> 07:42.220]  Wait, so you're skipping MagStripes and you're going right to RFID from the tokens.
[07:42.240 --> 07:44.740]  No, they have MagStripes, but not on a per...
[07:44.740 --> 07:48.140]  You can't just, like, add funds to your MagStripe card here.
[07:48.280 --> 07:50.040]  You can either buy a weekly or a monthly.
[07:50.220 --> 07:50.680]  That's it.
[07:50.960 --> 07:51.380]  I see.
[07:51.400 --> 07:52.740]  And that's on a MagStripe card.
[07:53.040 --> 07:55.620]  Or you can just buy tokens, which are just good for one trip.
[07:56.760 --> 07:58.280]  But they are now testing...
[07:59.140 --> 08:03.080]  They're rolling them out to, I think, you know, 10,000 test people.
[08:03.260 --> 08:16.140]  I'm not one of them, but an RFID card, which you will be able to put individual amounts onto it, like you can't do with the existing MagStripe cards here.
[08:16.360 --> 08:17.060]  Like $5.
[08:17.300 --> 08:18.740]  I want to put $5 on it.
[08:18.760 --> 08:22.240]  You'll be able to do that, which you can't do now, unless you want to buy a bunch of tokens.
[08:22.240 --> 08:28.240]  I remember, even with the tokens, somehow Philadelphia managed to frustrate me, because you couldn't just buy one token.
[08:28.400 --> 08:29.100]  You had to buy two.
[08:30.060 --> 08:30.540]  Yes.
[08:30.820 --> 08:36.140]  And they had a person at a turnstile, but you could not buy the token from that person.
[08:36.140 --> 08:37.580]  You had to buy it from a machine.
[08:37.580 --> 08:40.300]  If you didn't have exact change, you were up the creek.
[08:41.140 --> 08:44.620]  There are a few big stations, like Market East.
[08:44.820 --> 08:51.080]  They're starting to name all the stations after corporations that bribe them to name them after, like, AT&T station.
[08:51.500 --> 08:53.040]  It's the American way, yes.
[08:53.280 --> 08:53.480]  Yeah, I know.
[08:53.820 --> 09:06.440]  But there are a few large stations in Philadelphia where you can get change, you can buy your tokens, but they have to be in a set amount, either a pack of two or a pack of five, or, you know, like that.
[09:07.220 --> 09:12.600]  Well, in any event, here in New York, we will be getting the contactless system.
[09:12.780 --> 09:16.040]  I mean, you're touching something, but it's, yeah, you're not sliding something.
[09:16.040 --> 09:18.300]  It's not reading a mag stripe.
[09:19.120 --> 09:21.620]  We will be getting that the next few years.
[09:21.700 --> 09:25.140]  And what's amazing about New York is that you don't pay more during rush hour.
[09:25.240 --> 09:28.440]  You don't pay more if you go a long distance on the subway or the bus.
[09:28.940 --> 09:36.880]  So in many cities, what you have to do is you have to, what do they call it, check out, the phrase they use in these cities?
[09:37.220 --> 09:37.660]  Tapping.
[09:37.960 --> 09:39.680]  It's tapping in and tapping out.
[09:39.680 --> 09:45.200]  Yeah, you got to tap, in Seattle, for instance, you have to tap out, but only in certain places, on the train, but not on the bus.
[09:45.460 --> 09:45.680]  Yeah.
[09:46.020 --> 09:54.360]  And here, I don't think we'll have to worry about that unless they try and pull something and introduce different fare structures, which I hope they don't do.
[09:55.080 --> 09:59.420]  So that's one thing we learned on our trip is how this is being implemented throughout.
[09:59.420 --> 10:09.260]  And it's really kind of cool because, you know, unlike when the MetroCard was introduced, I get accused a lot of criticizing technology just out of hand.
[10:09.400 --> 10:10.560]  And, yeah, you know, I'm guilty.
[10:10.640 --> 10:11.720]  I do that.
[10:12.240 --> 10:14.680]  But there was a lot wrong with the MetroCard.
[10:14.900 --> 10:22.200]  And back in 1994, the first Hope Conference, we put a lot of that out there for the public to see, 1997 as well.
[10:22.640 --> 10:26.200]  And I think it was borne out by a lot of the security issues they had.
[10:26.200 --> 10:37.220]  But this kind of technology, while it's amazing for people that want to keep track of you, the technology is really, really cool.
[10:37.280 --> 10:41.780]  But you have to know the risks involved in being tracked.
[10:42.580 --> 10:49.960]  Back during the, I think it was Beyond Hope, the second Hope Conference in 1997, our friend Jim gave an anonymous...
[10:49.960 --> 10:50.840]  He was wearing a mask.
[10:50.900 --> 10:53.720]  He was wearing a balaclava, a red balaclava.
[10:53.720 --> 10:55.620]  That was the name he went by.
[10:55.680 --> 10:59.900]  And he gave this big talk about all the risks of this coming MetroCard.
[11:00.380 --> 11:01.740]  This is just coming.
[11:02.040 --> 11:08.600]  And that made front-page news on the Sunday edition of the New York Times.
[11:08.780 --> 11:19.720]  It was above the fold, you know, Beyond Hope, with Jim standing up there with the MetroCard up in the air, deriding some of the privacy risks involved with using one, which still exists.
[11:19.720 --> 11:21.560]  Like, if you were to get arrested, they could...
[11:21.560 --> 11:27.140]  If the police were to take your wallet and look at your MetroCard, they could find out everywhere you've been with it.
[11:27.280 --> 11:27.640]  Absolutely.
[11:27.840 --> 11:33.360]  And the reason I'm not as critical about the new RFID card is because it's not really that different.
[11:34.060 --> 11:36.360]  Unless they introduce the tap-out system.
[11:36.600 --> 11:41.680]  Because when you have that, then they know when you got off the train, not just when you got on the train and where.
[11:42.760 --> 11:44.360]  So these are things to look out for.
[11:45.300 --> 11:49.420]  And I'm sure we'll be talking to Steve about that as well later on because he must be aware of that.
[11:49.560 --> 11:58.660]  Yeah, it certainly does have a lot of implications and does go right along with our theme tonight of privacy and its elusive nature, whether we have it or not.
[11:58.780 --> 12:12.540]  And it's also striking to me, and I think I get this looking back at our journey, it's really about how this system is a lot of the same, like how there's a lot of homogeneity in how this system is now evolving.
[12:12.540 --> 12:18.040]  And I think of something silly, like even just buying these passes to load up.
[12:18.220 --> 12:22.180]  In all these different cities, you have to buy a unique pass.
[12:22.520 --> 12:31.820]  And usually it's more than like $5 or your fare approaches maybe $5 or $10 as a result of having to buy one of these to load up.
[12:31.940 --> 12:35.440]  And every single city would have to buy one of these if you travel a lot.
[12:35.440 --> 12:47.020]  It seems to me that there would be something in this that you could build in, like some of our handsets or other passes that maybe work in an entire region.
[12:47.140 --> 12:55.680]  Maybe there will be sort of a national metro pass, and then what kind of tracking abilities will be built into that.
[12:55.680 --> 13:07.240]  So there's a lot of sameness that is occurring and a lot of things that will not be interoperating, but probably could if taken to that even further level.
[13:07.440 --> 13:13.920]  In many ways, I'm amazed at how slow the authorities are towards integrating these things.
[13:14.060 --> 13:18.540]  Because an example, Long Island Railroad, MTA, Metro North, MTA.
[13:18.740 --> 13:20.600]  You can't buy a ticket from one to the other.
[13:20.600 --> 13:27.000]  You have to go to two different places, but they could easily integrate the two and track you throughout your entire journey.
[13:27.260 --> 13:30.500]  And they've already added it in the subway because that's also MTA.
[13:31.480 --> 13:33.440]  But they're lagging behind.
[13:34.640 --> 13:42.140]  The interoperability aspect is interesting because, if I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of that with the easy passes for paying tolls on bridges and things if you're driving.
[13:43.200 --> 13:49.940]  And the RFID, the contactless transit thing, has been a standard in so much of the world for so long now.
[13:49.940 --> 13:59.900]  I mean, the MetroCard was introduced in the 90s as sort of an unoptional thing, but it became the de facto standard in 2003 when you couldn't use the tokens anymore.
[14:00.360 --> 14:01.520]  It's now 2016.
[14:01.760 --> 14:08.280]  That's not really a very great age for, I guess, a standard to use on these things.
[14:09.500 --> 14:20.300]  But when we move on to the next thing, how much is going to be put behind it in the sense of making it interoperable with other things or at least leaving that possibility open to be implemented at some point in the future?
[14:20.460 --> 14:25.100]  Or are we going to have to start from scratch again if we want to use something and make some additional progress?
[14:25.580 --> 14:28.640]  Yeah, that interoperability not being built in, I don't think...
[14:28.640 --> 14:35.260]  It's very odd when you find these islands of places that might have that system, but it's not interoperating with anything.
[14:35.260 --> 14:41.380]  And I think you're going to see quirky little examples like that because it hasn't been...
[14:41.380 --> 14:45.400]  The technology is sort of standardized, but the implementation isn't.
[14:45.920 --> 14:56.300]  And those unique cities are still sort of even adopting it alone as an accomplishment or having the transit in the first place.
[14:56.340 --> 14:58.300]  There's a lot of stupid installations, I think.
[14:58.300 --> 15:14.860]  Yeah, but, you know, I was impressed with US in general, Canada definitely, in kind of catching up to where Europe is with mass transit and being able to, say, tell you when the next bus is coming or there's an app, but you type in a code for your bus stop and it'll tell you how long.
[15:15.580 --> 15:18.160]  Here in New York, we're sort of stumbling into that.
[15:18.380 --> 15:19.800]  I don't know why it's taking so long.
[15:19.960 --> 15:27.700]  I mean, London has had the countdown to the train in their underground for decades now, and we still can't get that right.
[15:27.800 --> 15:30.420]  If it is there, it's going to be completely inaccurate.
[15:31.000 --> 15:46.320]  But those are things that are tremendous conveniences, especially for out-of-towners like us, and sometimes when we don't even speak the language, to be on a bus and to have the bus always tell you what the next stop will be or announce in a voice what stop you're passing.
[15:46.660 --> 15:51.600]  These are things that require a minimal amount.
[15:51.600 --> 16:00.720]  I mean, I know I'm speaking for an entire city, and I know it's not minimal when you're doing it for an entire city, but the technology has already been installed in so many places.
[16:00.840 --> 16:02.160]  We know how to do it.
[16:02.300 --> 16:06.520]  It just needs to be done here, and it would be a tremendous advantage and convenience.
[16:07.220 --> 16:08.000]  What do you think, Bernie?
[16:08.980 --> 16:10.660]  I think standards are great.
[16:11.180 --> 16:13.480]  The great thing about standards is there's so many of them.
[16:15.240 --> 16:20.240]  And Rob mentioned that E-C-Pass is a standard on highways around the country, but it really isn't.
[16:20.340 --> 16:25.720]  There's other... some states, I think Florida, still uses something like E-C-Pass, but I think it's called SunPass.
[16:26.340 --> 16:30.980]  It's similar technology, but it's completely incompatible with E-C-Pass.
[16:31.100 --> 16:34.000]  And there's probably some other states that have their own system as well.
[16:34.160 --> 16:34.760]  Yeah, Bernie...
[16:34.760 --> 16:37.200]  There's a lot of political reasons this happens.
[16:37.360 --> 16:39.980]  It has nothing to do with what makes sense with technology.
[16:40.180 --> 16:40.600]  Yeah, Kyle?
[16:40.880 --> 16:43.840]  Yeah, like, I think in the West Coast, it's the GoPass.
[16:44.280 --> 16:44.520]  Yeah.
[16:44.520 --> 16:46.500]  But it doesn't work out here, and vice versa.
[16:46.600 --> 16:48.240]  You can't use it in some other place.
[16:48.240 --> 16:52.480]  Bernie, do you guys remember something called NICE, the New York Cash Exchange?
[16:52.860 --> 16:53.440]  Do you remember that, Bernie?
[16:53.640 --> 16:53.800]  Yes.
[16:53.940 --> 16:54.140]  Yeah.
[16:54.240 --> 16:54.420]  Yes.
[16:54.700 --> 16:57.860]  And then there was Cirrus, some other cash network.
[16:58.040 --> 17:01.480]  Used to be that you could not use your ATM outside of the state.
[17:01.700 --> 17:02.260]  All right?
[17:02.340 --> 17:07.600]  And then all of a sudden, these networks started coming together, and you were able to use it in New Jersey as well.
[17:07.980 --> 17:11.540]  And now we don't think twice about using our cards anywhere.
[17:11.740 --> 17:14.600]  Same thing with cell phones, pagers.
[17:14.600 --> 17:21.880]  I remember how amazed I was when I went down to Philadelphia, and my pager worked in southern New Jersey.
[17:22.000 --> 17:22.540]  But that was it.
[17:22.620 --> 17:23.940]  It didn't go any further than that.
[17:24.100 --> 17:29.260]  You couldn't have a pager that worked outside of your local area, let alone have a portable phone.
[17:29.400 --> 17:35.260]  So these are things that change over time, and then we just get used to it, and we assume that's the way it always has been when it has not.
[17:35.260 --> 17:48.620]  Yeah, but when you do see a sampling of the country, as we have in this last journey, I mean, it was really striking how much things are coming together and being a lot more similar and integrated, although slowly, very slowly.
[17:48.860 --> 17:50.680]  But it is beautiful to see.
[17:51.240 --> 18:05.900]  So, Emmanuel, I'm going to ask, in Canada, a large country just to the north of us, are they doing a better job with standardizing their fare payment systems with mass transit and with highways?
[18:06.400 --> 18:10.860]  I know you weren't driving in a car, but do you think you're doing a better job with that up there than we are down here?
[18:10.960 --> 18:13.020]  By standardization, you mean from city to city?
[18:13.280 --> 18:13.660]  Yeah.
[18:14.060 --> 18:15.180]  I don't think so.
[18:15.300 --> 18:23.060]  I mean, if you ever go to Toronto, for some reason, Toronto has this antiquated system that involves punching paper and writing things.
[18:23.260 --> 18:32.560]  It's really funny because you would expect Toronto, of all cities, to be somewhat modern, and unless they've changed it in the last year or so, their mass transit is just so completely archaic.
[18:32.700 --> 18:43.420]  So, when you guys were driving a truck a while back across Canada and going through all the bits and pieces of the country, did you find any reasonable amount of interoperability out there?
[18:43.420 --> 18:46.760]  Well, we got very confused by the way stations.
[18:46.760 --> 18:49.880]  I still don't know how those work, and we didn't know if we were supposed to go there.
[18:50.880 --> 18:56.880]  But, no, we didn't have to pay any tolls, so there wasn't anything quite like that.
[18:57.540 --> 19:00.980]  Kyle, do you remember any kind of technology that was in use as we were driving?
[19:02.280 --> 19:03.780]  I can't think of anything.
[19:04.100 --> 19:12.820]  I know in Europe, sometimes, you wind up paying a road tax just by driving down a road, and it's just... it's sent to your car somehow, sent to your account.
[19:13.360 --> 19:15.300]  But I saw no such thing in Canada.
[19:15.520 --> 19:18.080]  No, not with highways or in different cities.
[19:18.480 --> 19:19.700]  It wasn't a concern.
[19:19.700 --> 19:34.780]  I think just basically parking and when you're leaving your vehicle in some new city, you have to understand what basics are of street parking and stuff.
[19:34.900 --> 19:38.440]  But that would be the most granular example I could think of.
[19:38.460 --> 19:40.080]  Well, I think that's a good mental exercise.
[19:40.220 --> 19:50.800]  In fact, we noticed on this last trip that there are some cities where you have to put a parking pass on the outside of your car, which I don't understand the logic behind that because somebody could just take it.
[19:51.060 --> 19:53.780]  But that's their tradition in particular...
[19:53.780 --> 19:54.800]  Yeah, it was in Vancouver.
[19:55.300 --> 20:00.620]  I think the parking, when you paid for it, you would leave the label on the outside of your car.
[20:00.740 --> 20:01.760]  I like the differences.
[20:01.940 --> 20:07.900]  I like if every city, every country has it a little bit differently and you learn what those differences are and adjust.
[20:07.900 --> 20:17.920]  But I think the overall technology can be a parallel, can be fairly much similar as far as this is what it does.
[20:17.920 --> 20:19.540]  This is the convenience that it offers you.
[20:19.640 --> 20:21.000]  This is what you get out of it.
[20:21.500 --> 20:23.500]  Because that way, you know, it's...
[20:23.500 --> 20:26.160]  I've been in some countries where you just...
[20:26.160 --> 20:31.960]  Like Cuba, for instance, Brazil, you don't want to get on a bus because if you get on a bus, you're never going to figure it out.
[20:32.580 --> 20:35.020]  It's something for the natives, the locals.
[20:35.020 --> 20:40.520]  They understand it, maybe, but it's extremely complicated.
[20:40.680 --> 20:43.020]  And I think to many people, New York is that way as well.
[20:43.660 --> 20:45.080]  Yeah, adequate signage.
[20:45.180 --> 20:50.440]  I think street signs was another difficult thing, especially like Montreal.
[20:50.940 --> 20:53.060]  They tended not to have like very big signs.
[20:53.060 --> 20:56.000]  It would be very small and not always obvious.
[20:56.280 --> 20:56.460]  Yeah.
[20:56.720 --> 20:57.660]  But that's it.
[20:57.760 --> 21:03.520]  Like little subtleties of how they choose a font and how much signage there is.
[21:03.520 --> 21:12.460]  I think people find that on the subways that it can be difficult to make sense of all the symbols and colors and different lines if you haven't studied it in the past.
[21:12.600 --> 21:13.480]  I know I do sometimes.
[21:13.680 --> 21:17.220]  I don't know how we got into the subject of mass transit, but it is fascinating.
[21:17.220 --> 21:19.220]  And it has to do with technology quite a bit.
[21:19.340 --> 21:20.340]  And things are changing.
[21:20.340 --> 21:24.200]  And we are going to be witnessing those changes right here in New York and throughout the world.
[21:24.880 --> 21:31.040]  And we'd like to hear listeners' views and experiences with this as well.
[21:31.160 --> 21:34.000]  Our email address, OTH at 2600.com.
[21:35.260 --> 21:37.660]  And, you know, we're waiting for Steve Ramam to show up.
[21:37.780 --> 21:39.720]  We were going to play some excerpts from some of his talks.
[21:39.840 --> 21:41.180]  But, you know, this is such a good conversation.
[21:41.180 --> 21:47.980]  Maybe we should just maybe get a couple listeners to call in to talk about this and nothing else, if you want to.
[21:47.980 --> 21:53.820]  Our phone number, 718-780-8888 is our phone number.
[21:54.000 --> 21:54.420]  I got that right.
[21:54.680 --> 21:55.400]  It's been such a long time.
[21:55.700 --> 21:55.960]  Indeed it is.
[21:56.160 --> 22:00.420]  And Steve is going to waltz through the door at any moment and then we'll switch gears and talk to him.
[22:00.720 --> 22:05.260]  So we have transit cards now for like three or four cities that we kept.
[22:05.960 --> 22:08.280]  And they're all the same, but they're different systems.
[22:08.420 --> 22:09.680]  So they don't work in different places.
[22:09.960 --> 22:10.240]  You know, it's funny.
[22:10.320 --> 22:18.880]  If someone calling has a whole portfolio of interesting transit cards, please let us know what interesting city you've been to with this system.
[22:19.020 --> 22:25.700]  When I was in Seattle, I was riding on my own on a bus and I used the daily card and it didn't work.
[22:25.860 --> 22:27.960]  And the driver said, I don't know what kind of card this is.
[22:28.020 --> 22:28.940]  And I said, it's a daily card.
[22:29.020 --> 22:30.840]  You know, I was kind of defensive about it.
[22:30.940 --> 22:31.940]  He said, okay, just sit down.
[22:32.420 --> 22:35.580]  And then I realized after I sat down that I was using a card from Los Angeles.
[22:36.600 --> 22:39.600]  Of course, I went back and apologized and paid my fare.
[22:39.780 --> 22:42.600]  But wow, that's the kind of thing you got to look out for sometimes.
[22:43.220 --> 22:44.880]  Let's take one phone call at least.
[22:45.300 --> 22:45.720]  Good evening.
[22:45.860 --> 22:46.380]  You're on Off the Hook.
[22:48.060 --> 22:48.700]  Go ahead.
[22:48.800 --> 22:49.200]  Speak up.
[22:49.920 --> 22:50.300]  Hello.
[22:50.720 --> 22:50.900]  Hi.
[22:51.180 --> 22:54.780]  So I was listening to your conversation about the tap-on and the tap-off card.
[22:55.000 --> 22:55.740]  Yes, that was us.
[22:56.360 --> 22:56.560]  Yes.
[22:57.160 --> 23:00.820]  So in Sydney, they've implemented that system within the past two years.
[23:00.860 --> 23:04.640]  And their transit system had two different levels of bus routes.
[23:04.760 --> 23:07.900]  One for Zone 1, one for Zone 2, where Zone 1 was the inner city.
[23:08.120 --> 23:09.860]  Zone 2 is the suburbs.
[23:10.740 --> 23:14.500]  Users who were commuting to work using different modes of transportation.
[23:14.500 --> 23:21.840]  So if you were taking two buses and then switching to a train or taking a ferry, needed a magnetic card for each mode of transportation.
[23:22.540 --> 23:28.960]  And now with the tap-on, tap-off card, you just need your one card with your flat fee per week to get around.
[23:28.960 --> 23:30.840]  So it's the talk of the town.
[23:31.040 --> 23:33.080]  It's a big saving financially for everyone.
[23:33.320 --> 23:35.880]  Now, this is Sydney, Australia?
[23:36.380 --> 23:36.700]  Correct.
[23:37.220 --> 23:37.600]  Awesome.
[23:37.720 --> 23:38.680]  Is that where you're calling from now?
[23:39.280 --> 23:40.040]  No, no, no, no.
[23:40.040 --> 23:40.760]  I'm from New York.
[23:40.940 --> 23:41.080]  Okay.
[23:41.080 --> 23:43.400]  But I was in Sydney in March.
[23:43.640 --> 23:43.960]  Uh-huh.
[23:44.700 --> 23:56.020]  And the cards are color-coded so that if you're a senior and you pay less per ride, presumably, your card is a different color from the ones that regular adult commuters would have.
[23:57.940 --> 23:58.380]  Interesting.
[23:58.380 --> 23:59.040]  One of the...
[23:59.040 --> 23:59.380]  That's cool.
[23:59.660 --> 24:01.140]  ...defects that they found...
[24:01.140 --> 24:01.300]  Sorry.
[24:01.960 --> 24:02.400]  Go on.
[24:02.520 --> 24:02.820]  Go ahead.
[24:03.080 --> 24:04.180]  The defect is what?
[24:05.160 --> 24:06.120]  Um, they...
[24:06.660 --> 24:13.460]  Once you tap on and off for eight rides within a week, the rest of your rides are free for the remainder of the week.
[24:13.460 --> 24:25.980]  So people were finding ways where there were bus routes close to train stations where they could tap on and off and do that eight times in one day and then ride free as many times as they wanted for the rest of the week.
[24:26.180 --> 24:31.300]  Now, is that something that the people in charge approved of or did they race to fix that?
[24:31.660 --> 24:32.980]  They raced to fix it.
[24:33.140 --> 24:33.500]  I see.
[24:34.180 --> 24:36.120]  So, yeah, that was unanticipated.
[24:36.360 --> 24:38.180]  That's the hacker mentality right there.
[24:38.360 --> 24:39.460]  Yeah, I kind of like that.
[24:39.460 --> 24:40.660]  I can appreciate that.
[24:42.040 --> 24:50.100]  And the other interesting thing about that is that, you know, in New York City we have the select bus service where you buy your ticket in advance to get on the bus.
[24:50.580 --> 24:51.720]  That's a great system.
[24:51.720 --> 24:56.140]  It's very European, but it confuses a lot of people that aren't familiar with it.
[24:56.840 --> 24:57.280]  Yes.
[24:57.480 --> 24:59.720]  And I've seen that happen many times.
[25:01.080 --> 25:06.920]  So when you're going on the bus, you kind of take a risk that the monitors aren't going to come on the bus and check the tickets.
[25:07.500 --> 25:23.340]  In Sydney, even though you have this card where you can tap on and tap off and you don't really have to interact with the bus driver, you still have to enter the bus at the front of the bus even though they have one of those machines for tapping on and off at the back of the bus.
[25:23.340 --> 25:27.040]  So I guess it's a time saver to some extent.
[25:27.040 --> 25:30.380]  I don't understand why you have to do it in front of the bus driver.
[25:30.600 --> 25:35.300]  But I thought that was another odd little thing about their system that could be a tiny bit more efficient.
[25:35.960 --> 25:36.860]  Yeah, interesting.
[25:37.140 --> 25:37.420]  Wow.
[25:37.720 --> 25:45.700]  We should get a collection, like you said, Kyle, of all these different systems, cards, and compare and come up with better ideas.
[25:46.040 --> 25:48.340]  Are you looking forward to the changes in New York?
[25:48.880 --> 25:49.980]  You know, yeah, I do.
[25:50.120 --> 25:52.720]  I liked it very much.
[25:52.720 --> 25:54.660]  Instead of sliding a card, it was much faster.
[25:54.940 --> 25:55.360]  Uh-huh.
[25:55.500 --> 25:57.680]  Well, it's going to be like that here pretty soon.
[25:57.780 --> 26:00.440]  I think within the next five years, certainly.
[26:01.580 --> 26:02.460]  That's a long time.
[26:02.620 --> 26:09.640]  I think Sydney's system is pretty good service over there.
[26:09.760 --> 26:14.900]  And they're a much smaller city, a much less dense population than we have here in the New York tri-state area.
[26:14.940 --> 26:20.500]  So it might be a good place to look as a model for how New York can implement the system here.
[26:20.680 --> 26:21.060]  Absolutely.
[26:21.060 --> 26:24.220]  As are all these places that we have experiences in.
[26:24.460 --> 26:25.720]  Hey, thanks very much for your call.
[26:25.900 --> 26:27.420]  And I hope to see Sydney someday.
[26:28.200 --> 26:28.440]  Yes.
[26:28.520 --> 26:29.080]  Thanks so much.
[26:29.220 --> 26:30.140]  Great conversation, guys.
[26:30.360 --> 26:30.600]  Thanks.
[26:30.880 --> 26:32.240]  And completely unplanned.
[26:32.320 --> 26:33.220]  That's the magic of Off the Hook.
[26:33.280 --> 26:35.040]  We just have these conversations about technology.
[26:35.800 --> 26:37.300]  Let's have another caller join us.
[26:37.380 --> 26:37.700]  Good evening.
[26:37.840 --> 26:38.500]  You're on Off the Hook.
[26:39.160 --> 26:39.860]  Good evening.
[26:40.420 --> 26:40.820]  Hi.
[26:40.860 --> 26:41.380]  What's on your mind?
[26:42.000 --> 26:46.620]  I just want to talk about the train system in Bangkok, Thailand.
[26:46.920 --> 26:47.420]  Oh, okay.
[26:47.420 --> 26:49.760]  I believe Bernie was there, right?
[26:49.960 --> 26:50.120]  Yeah.
[26:50.540 --> 26:50.700]  Yeah.
[26:52.060 --> 26:58.900]  Now, what you do is when you go into the train station, you look at the stop where you want to get off.
[26:59.360 --> 27:01.840]  And then it will tell you how much it is.
[27:02.360 --> 27:07.640]  And as they go from station to station, they announce the stop.
[27:07.920 --> 27:11.780]  For example, you know, I get on at a place called Sa Pankwai.
[27:12.140 --> 27:14.160]  And then the next one is Arie.
[27:14.560 --> 27:16.720]  Then the next one is Sanam Pao.
[27:17.060 --> 27:21.160]  And they'll just say until you arrive where you go and you pay your ticket.
[27:22.560 --> 27:30.360]  And when you get ready to leave the train station, you put your ticket in and it just keeps it, you know, because you pay your exact fare, you know.
[27:30.760 --> 27:32.140]  And it's just interesting.
[27:32.400 --> 27:32.940]  Very convenient.
[27:33.220 --> 27:40.200]  That reminds me of the old Washington Metro system that would keep your card if you had the exact change left on it and you'd be able to walk out.
[27:40.660 --> 27:42.660]  Otherwise, you'd have extra on your card.
[27:43.080 --> 27:43.480]  Emmanuel?
[27:43.720 --> 27:44.080]  Yes, Bernie.
[27:44.580 --> 27:45.640]  Okay, thank you very much.
[27:45.800 --> 27:46.540]  Thanks for your call.
[27:47.120 --> 27:52.480]  When the gentleman was just talking about the Bangkok system, I was there a little more than 10 years ago.
[27:52.600 --> 27:57.460]  And the tickets he's referring to are actually RFID coins.
[27:57.460 --> 28:03.120]  They're plastic coins or tokens about the size of these Susan B.
[28:03.220 --> 28:05.580]  Anthony dollar coins that we use or don't use.
[28:06.400 --> 28:12.620]  But they're black plastic and inside them there is an RFID, passive RFID transponder.
[28:12.800 --> 28:13.980]  And that's the ticket.
[28:14.180 --> 28:15.240]  There's no marking on it.
[28:15.320 --> 28:16.400]  It's completely black.
[28:16.760 --> 28:20.580]  But you insert them into a slot as if it were a coin.
[28:21.820 --> 28:22.300]  Interesting.
[28:22.920 --> 28:27.240]  And is it like depositing a coin in something else where you don't get it back or does it give it you back?
[28:27.560 --> 28:36.680]  Yeah, when you leave as the gentleman as the caller was just saying when you leave after you get off you put the coin in a slot and it's red and you don't get it back.
[28:37.040 --> 28:38.380]  So you buy it in advance.
[28:38.880 --> 28:44.140]  I don't know why they don't just keep one coin and you just keep using it over and over but that's just how they do it.
[28:44.320 --> 28:45.780]  And they've been doing that for more than a decade.
[28:45.940 --> 28:53.920]  When I arrived there in late I guess it was late 2005 I just got there like a week after that huge tsunami that killed like a quarter million people that tied that wave.
[28:53.920 --> 28:57.880]  but that didn't hit Bangkok that just hit the coast on the Indian Ocean side.
[28:59.100 --> 29:02.060]  That subway system in Bangkok had just opened.
[29:02.200 --> 29:09.360]  It just opened like I think just weeks before they still had the king's throne there in the subway.
[29:09.900 --> 29:18.720]  The king was there to like cut the ribbon on the thing and his throne was still down there like enclosed in glass where the king had just sat to...
[29:18.720 --> 29:21.620]  and it was an incredibly impressive engineering project.
[29:21.800 --> 29:27.740]  They had all these pictures of how they cut these giant tunnels with these giant machines and it was really impressive.
[29:28.020 --> 29:33.240]  It was the most amazing underground transit system I'd ever seen in my life.
[29:33.380 --> 29:34.940]  It was brand new and it was state-of-the-art.
[29:36.280 --> 29:36.780]  Wow.
[29:37.560 --> 29:49.220]  Well, as you can see there are so many different systems throughout the world and I think it's just one subset of the hacker culture to explore them and compare them and design new ones.
[29:49.460 --> 29:50.900]  And do fun things with them.
[29:50.980 --> 29:51.440]  I remember...
[29:51.440 --> 29:58.180]  I think it was around the turn of the century when they introduced the RFID cards in England in the UK and the Oyster cards.
[29:58.380 --> 29:59.080]  Yeah, the Oyster cards.
[29:59.120 --> 29:59.360]  Yes.
[29:59.800 --> 30:19.580]  And I remember reading about somebody who had taken one of the plastic cards that contained the RFID loop and dissolving it in acetone so he could extract the RFID loop and then once he had it he installed it in a toy magic wand from Harry Potter so he could then enter the train system just by waving his magic wand over the transponder.
[30:19.740 --> 30:20.300]  Oh, that's good.
[30:20.460 --> 30:22.700]  And possibly muttering an incantation of some sort.
[30:23.360 --> 30:25.040]  I'm sure there was a bit of that.
[30:25.260 --> 30:26.600]  Every city has a different name.
[30:26.720 --> 30:27.820]  What's Seattle called again?
[30:27.960 --> 30:28.800]  Seattle has a certain...
[30:28.800 --> 30:29.540]  It's the Orca.
[30:29.740 --> 30:30.360]  Orca card.
[30:30.440 --> 30:32.300]  It's an Orca Pass or a card.
[30:32.640 --> 30:34.740]  In Montreal it's the Opus card.
[30:35.140 --> 30:42.480]  I forget what it's called in Vancouver but I know somebody had just figured out a way to defeat it so people were talking about it on newscasts.
[30:42.640 --> 30:44.000]  But every city has a different name.
[30:44.000 --> 30:46.940]  I don't know if New York is going to have a specific name.
[30:47.060 --> 30:48.100]  It would be kind of cool if we did.
[30:48.360 --> 30:50.860]  Maybe we can help name it on the show.
[30:50.940 --> 30:51.840]  It's called a Trans Pass.
[30:52.300 --> 30:53.060]  Well, that's boring.
[30:53.640 --> 30:54.540]  You don't have to...
[30:54.540 --> 30:55.660]  You could be of any...
[30:55.660 --> 30:56.120]  You know...
[30:56.120 --> 30:58.620]  You could be anybody and use one even though they call it a Trans Pass.
[30:58.860 --> 31:02.060]  The Trans Pass just sounds Orwellian and dull.
[31:02.760 --> 31:02.940]  Yeah.
[31:03.120 --> 31:09.160]  Well, the new one the new RFID system they're rolling out it has a new name I can't remember the name of it but it will no longer be called the Trans Pass.
[31:09.760 --> 31:10.160]  Okay.
[31:10.380 --> 31:12.400]  Well, hopefully it's a more romanticized name.
[31:12.920 --> 31:13.060]  Yeah.
[31:13.440 --> 31:15.540]  We're still waiting for Steve Romham to show up.
[31:15.680 --> 31:18.120]  He should be arriving any moment.
[31:18.660 --> 31:46.140]  But I think we should also point out that this is a fundraiser a fundraising program and we would like people to call 516-620-3602 If you've enjoyed this conversation please call and pledge whatever it is you can afford and what we suggest people do tonight is call and ask the people at the other end what kinds of presents we can send you for your pledge of whatever amount.
[31:46.340 --> 32:13.640]  You pick a number let's say I don't know $50 or $75 and for every one of those they will be happy to tell you you can get this, this, this and that and you can you can choose or you can just say you know what it doesn't matter I just want to donate to the radio station to keep these kinds of conversations on the air there's all sorts of possibilities 516-620-3602 is the telephone number to speak
[32:13.640 --> 32:43.860]  to the nice people down in the tally room we do have I know Rob you have more paintings I do yes in the past as long time listeners to this program might know I've done series of paintings of one set was old computers cool old computers another set was portraits of individuals in hacker history and the set I'm working on now is a set of historically interesting telephones just historical
[32:43.860 --> 32:55.640]  telephones So, particular individual telephones that are notable for one reason or another, or interesting types of phone that just hold a particular place in hacker history or telecom history.
[32:56.160 --> 32:59.600]  Can you give us an example, though, of a specific historic telephone?
[32:59.880 --> 33:00.200]  I can.
[33:00.400 --> 33:04.540]  There are a lot of people out there that are probably scratching their head wondering, what in God's name we're talking about?
[33:04.700 --> 33:07.500]  Telephones are just the things people carry in their pockets these days.
[33:08.140 --> 33:09.580]  What's a real historic telephone?
[33:09.800 --> 33:14.080]  Well, telephones are not only an appliance that you've had in front of you for probably your whole life.
[33:14.080 --> 33:20.660]  They're a really interesting example of sort of industrial design and cleverness when it comes to...
[33:20.660 --> 33:36.640]  Like, there are the phones, the first phones, the ones designed by people like Alexander Graham Bell and Philip Rice, who was a German inventor, who invented one of the first telephone-like devices that could transmit voice-like sounds.
[33:37.060 --> 33:38.860]  There's his phone in the series.
[33:38.860 --> 33:44.260]  There's Alexander Graham Bell's very first prototype, which was interesting for only having one transducer.
[33:44.420 --> 33:49.040]  You would speak into the hole in the device and then hold it up to your ear to hear the response.
[33:49.740 --> 33:56.560]  And that was... even before you could really make out the speech, you could tell that it was a voice on the line, but you couldn't really tell what they were saying.
[33:56.560 --> 33:58.700]  That would happen in a later model of the phone later.
[33:59.580 --> 34:02.060]  There are also some interesting types of phones.
[34:02.180 --> 34:06.160]  There is one that I really like called the Alexander Graham Plane.
[34:06.440 --> 34:10.160]  And some of our Canadian listeners might have perked up at this.
[34:10.300 --> 34:11.940]  Alexander Graham Plane.
[34:12.040 --> 34:13.180]  Alexander Graham Plane.
[34:13.460 --> 34:17.680]  And what this was was a novelty phone shaped like a really cute cartoon airplane.
[34:18.060 --> 34:26.380]  And it was something that came about in, I think, 1978 when sort of novelty phones started taking hold.
[34:26.380 --> 34:33.420]  But the notable thing about this was it was during the era where phone companies didn't really like novelty phones.
[34:33.560 --> 34:36.300]  They didn't want you to buy a phone from somewhere else and hook it up to their system.
[34:36.480 --> 34:37.740]  They wanted to give you the phone.
[34:37.980 --> 34:40.200]  But people still wanted cute and clever phones.
[34:40.380 --> 34:45.680]  So Nortel, Northern Telecom in Canada, solved this by basically making their own novelty phones.
[34:45.820 --> 34:57.380]  So the Alexander Graham Plane was one of the very few novelty phones made in that era, which was actually marketed and made available by a phone company rather than just some, like, Radio Shack or somebody.
[34:57.900 --> 34:58.260]  Wow.
[34:58.540 --> 35:02.380]  I can actually bring up the picture of that because we can't show the listeners.
[35:02.420 --> 35:03.120]  We can't show the listeners.
[35:03.160 --> 35:04.140]  I can show you at least.
[35:04.140 --> 35:05.220]  And it's a cute little airplane.
[35:05.400 --> 35:09.740]  And you would put the receiver across the back of it and it would be the wings across the back of the plane.
[35:09.780 --> 35:10.900]  I like your interpretation of it.
[35:11.040 --> 35:11.240]  Thank you.
[35:11.240 --> 35:13.480]  It actually looks like a little cartoony device.
[35:13.700 --> 35:15.440]  It's not so...
[35:15.440 --> 35:17.300]  But it was very cute.
[35:17.400 --> 35:18.480]  They made these in camouflage.
[35:18.700 --> 35:23.760]  They made them in the colors of certain airlines, had their own versions of it.
[35:23.900 --> 35:31.680]  And it was just a sort of late 70s, early 80s bit of pop culture that existed if you were around in that area at that point.
[35:31.840 --> 35:40.620]  Now, how would somebody call in to 516-620-3602 and get one of your amazing paintings of historic telephones?
[35:41.240 --> 35:46.620]  Well, if you were using Alexander Graham plane, you would dial the dial which was in the plane's propeller.
[35:46.860 --> 35:48.060]  But if you're using...
[35:48.060 --> 35:50.020]  Do you think someone out there might be using an Alexander Graham plane?
[35:50.140 --> 35:52.680]  They do have something of a following among enthusiasts.
[35:52.920 --> 35:54.220]  They're a nice little curiosity.
[35:55.120 --> 36:01.740]  But if you're using a regular phone, you could also call Country Code 1, 516-620-3602.
[36:02.000 --> 36:11.940]  Or if you wanted to leave telephones out of the equation entirely for some reason, you could go to give2wbai.org and ask for the historical telephones, which you can get for a pledge of $50.
[36:13.240 --> 36:13.920]  There are some of these.
[36:14.020 --> 36:21.060]  If you want to take a look at some of them that have been painted and supplied to the station already, you could do that on my website, which is robvincent.net.
[36:21.440 --> 36:23.640]  A bunch of these are right on the front page there for you to look at.
[36:25.520 --> 36:28.320]  And yeah, there are some of the ones that I've made already.
[36:28.320 --> 36:36.960]  The ones that I've made in the future, which will be supplied as people request them, will be even more interesting and mysterious things.
[36:37.200 --> 36:39.780]  I'm blown away by what you're able to create there.
[36:39.940 --> 36:41.440]  So that's really incredible.
[36:41.660 --> 36:52.920]  There's another phone called the Gower Bell Telephone, which I really like, which was by a fellow named Gower, who ran a Bell franchise in this country in the late 19th century for a bit.
[36:53.080 --> 36:57.200]  And then he decided to take it over to England and see what he could do there.
[36:57.200 --> 37:07.440]  He sort of redesigned the telephone around Alexander Graham Bell's receiver patents, so he wouldn't have to pay to use it.
[37:07.600 --> 37:16.780]  If you've seen this, maybe in old time, maybe English pop culture, they had these sort of weird rubbery tubes that you would hold to your ear.
[37:17.000 --> 37:18.000]  And that was the receiver.
[37:18.100 --> 37:20.500]  They sort of hung off the bottom of the phone unit.
[37:20.680 --> 37:21.060]  Wow.
[37:21.200 --> 37:22.240]  And this was...
[37:22.240 --> 37:23.420]  Hold that up to the microphone a little closer.
[37:23.540 --> 37:23.660]  Yeah.
[37:23.860 --> 37:24.680]  Look at that, folks.
[37:24.760 --> 37:25.440]  That's amazing.
[37:25.440 --> 37:27.480]  But this was designed around Bell's patents.
[37:27.680 --> 37:33.940]  He was using the name Bell on his phone as a marketing thing, but he wasn't all that keen to pay for Bell's patents.
[37:34.100 --> 37:42.900]  So it's not only sort of an interesting-looking gadget, but it's interesting for its place in the history of the phone and its introduction.
[37:43.120 --> 37:44.800]  So a pledge of how much?
[37:44.840 --> 37:46.020]  Is it $50?
[37:46.500 --> 37:47.340]  $50, yes.
[37:47.480 --> 37:51.680]  That's a bargain for that kind of artwork that you're...
[37:51.680 --> 37:52.000]  It is.
[37:52.000 --> 37:52.420]  As you need to.
[37:52.420 --> 37:53.780]  You won't find this anywhere.
[37:54.060 --> 37:54.340]  It is.
[37:54.340 --> 37:54.980]  These aren't prints.
[37:55.120 --> 37:55.640]  These aren't copies.
[37:55.780 --> 37:57.700]  These are the original canvas paintings.
[37:58.440 --> 38:04.960]  This $50 is far less than I would charge for such a thing in my regular art career, but these are donations I've made to the station.
[38:07.660 --> 38:14.000]  And you would also get a little note card with it explaining what the phone is and a little bit of the history behind it.
[38:14.000 --> 38:16.920]  516-620-3602.
[38:17.080 --> 38:26.820]  Take advantage of this unique offer that Rob is offering to the hacker community, to the listening community, to everybody that appreciates art, appreciates telephones.
[38:27.020 --> 38:28.120]  It's a great combination.
[38:28.380 --> 38:33.960]  And I've seen your work before, and it's really incredible, some of the things that you're able to capture.
[38:34.900 --> 38:41.380]  There's a limited number of these things left, I believe, because you can only paint so many hours in a day, right?
[38:41.880 --> 38:42.680]  This is true, unfortunately.
[38:43.260 --> 38:44.200]  Thanks for that, Rob.
[38:44.340 --> 38:47.840]  Those are really spectacular and a good value.
[38:48.040 --> 38:49.320]  His gift to the station.
[38:49.320 --> 39:05.800]  And it is really what we're about here, volunteering and donating our time, our efforts for the programming you're listening to now, as well as coming up with these thank you gifts.
[39:05.960 --> 39:09.600]  They're all part of being here, and we'd like to stay on the air.
[39:09.720 --> 39:16.180]  We'd like to continue to bring news and discussion in the realm of hacking to you, the audience.
[39:16.180 --> 39:20.320]  So please go to give to WBAI.org.
[39:20.740 --> 39:21.220]  Yes.
[39:21.440 --> 39:26.820]  As well as giving us a call, 516-620-3602.
[39:27.100 --> 39:27.640]  That's right.
[39:28.000 --> 39:36.140]  And if you have a premium in the past you have not yet received, be aware that we will not rest until we solve all outstanding premium issues.
[39:36.380 --> 39:37.920]  So we're working on that.
[39:38.020 --> 39:38.700]  We will not forget.
[39:39.300 --> 39:40.500]  We always...
[39:40.500 --> 39:41.720]  Sometimes it takes a little while.
[39:41.720 --> 39:49.180]  Well, we're getting better at it, but don't let that dissuade you, because keeping this place on the air, that's the main thing.
[39:49.400 --> 39:55.280]  Keeping WBAI going at 99.5 FM, in the middle of the FM dial in New York City, that's a huge undertaking.
[39:55.500 --> 39:58.640]  And we've been doing it since 1960 with the help of listeners like you.
[39:58.900 --> 40:00.980]  So we hope to be able to continue to do that.
[40:00.980 --> 40:07.020]  So give a call to 516-620-3602, so you don't forget, do it right now.
[40:08.080 --> 40:09.960]  That's like they say on late night TV.
[40:10.360 --> 40:11.940]  It's an important thing.
[40:12.020 --> 40:18.380]  And again, if for some reason phones and paintings aren't your thing, there's so much else that is being offered at the radio station.
[40:18.440 --> 40:27.880]  You can go, as Kyle said, give to WBAI.org and just rifle through the various things that are there, or give a call to the nice folks at 516-620-3602 and ask them.
[40:27.880 --> 40:34.660]  Any pledge level, any gift you can offer us is a huge, huge deal for us.
[40:34.800 --> 40:40.560]  We accept all forms of payment all at once or over a period of time.
[40:40.800 --> 40:49.380]  I think there's still a BAI Buddy program where you can pay in monthly installments, which are predictable and at regular intervals and such.
[40:49.640 --> 40:51.340]  There's a myriad of ways you can help.
[40:51.440 --> 40:59.260]  The important thing is that you act, that you are able to pick up the phone, give us a call at 516-620-3602 or pledge online.
[40:59.840 --> 41:02.000]  We appreciate every bit of that support.
[41:02.220 --> 41:12.620]  We're volunteers and we're here for you, but we need to know that we can count on you for this little bit of giving that keeps us on the air and keeps the station running.
[41:13.280 --> 41:13.800]  All right.
[41:13.860 --> 41:18.860]  We are still waiting for Private Eye Extraordinaire, Steve Rombam, to make his appearance here at the radio station.
[41:19.060 --> 41:22.100]  Fortunately, this is a two-hour show because the first hour is almost up.
[41:22.560 --> 41:24.780]  I think he's having some subway issues.
[41:24.980 --> 41:27.340]  I think that's the latest as far as that goes.
[41:28.100 --> 41:29.660]  But he should be here momentarily.
[41:29.660 --> 41:38.180]  What I'd like to do is, as I said at the beginning of the show, play an excerpt from one of his previous talks at the HOPE Conference.
[41:38.240 --> 41:42.860]  The HOPE Conference, of course, being Hackers on Planet Earth, takes place every two years here in New York City.
[41:43.500 --> 41:48.820]  And the next one, the 11th HOPE, is coming up July 22nd through 24th at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
[41:49.800 --> 42:00.960]  And I'm sure Steve will be giving an amazing talk there as well and scaring people with predictions of the future and of the kinds of surveillance that we have to look forward to.
[42:02.240 --> 42:07.520]  So go to hope.net or xi.hope.net because xi means 11.
[42:08.100 --> 42:12.960]  Either one will take you to the current HOPE page and you can get updates as far as all that goes.
[42:12.960 --> 42:19.460]  And by the way, if you're submitting a talk idea, we are accepting talk ideas, panels, things like that.
[42:19.460 --> 42:23.500]  If you have an idea for something you'd like to present, we're getting so many of them, hundreds of them.
[42:23.980 --> 42:25.840]  And some are really, really good.
[42:25.840 --> 42:34.120]  And from all sorts of diverse people around the planet, the information on how to do that is also at that website, HOPE.net.
[42:34.280 --> 42:36.200]  But we have a deadline now.
[42:36.320 --> 42:38.200]  And the deadline is May the 20th.
[42:38.260 --> 42:38.860]  That's a Friday.
[42:39.460 --> 42:40.460]  It's coming up.
[42:40.460 --> 42:42.500]  It will be upon us before you know it.
[42:42.580 --> 42:45.420]  So if you're thinking of submitting something, do it soon.
[42:45.680 --> 42:47.140]  May 20th is our cutoff.
[42:47.300 --> 42:49.400]  We have to start printing things.
[42:49.800 --> 42:52.240]  And there are deadlines as far as that goes as well.
[42:52.580 --> 42:54.300]  And we also have to make the schedule up.
[42:54.460 --> 43:05.080]  So if you're considering submitting a talk for the 11th HOPE, go to hope.net and write down May 20th as the day you have to do it by.
[43:05.840 --> 43:21.460]  And of course, if you submit a talk or if you don't get it together in time and it ends up not being one of the talks accepted at the conference, do not panic because we will have an unscheduled track where you can come in and claim a block of time and basically speak about whatever you want.
[43:21.600 --> 43:23.220]  We've been doing this at HOPE for a long time.
[43:23.220 --> 43:25.620]  It's always been very popular and successful, I think.
[43:25.860 --> 43:37.520]  And it's something that I particularly do enjoy about the conference is you can just have a last minute off the cuff talk or you could have something that you put more work into and planning and stuff.
[43:37.640 --> 43:40.340]  But you can basically claim it and just do it.
[43:42.120 --> 43:59.620]  But speaking as someone who's been seeing the talks as they've been coming in, the submissions for talks and just all these great ideas and this wide variety of stuff from this wide variety of people, I am pretty blown away by just the sheer quality of what we're getting and the sheer volume of what we're getting.
[43:59.820 --> 44:04.480]  It's so much and I'm already sorry that we can't accept all of it because there is...
[44:04.480 --> 44:07.540]  We'd have to go for several weeks if we accepted all of it.
[44:07.700 --> 44:11.480]  Yeah, but there are some really special things in there and I'm really excited for them.
[44:11.980 --> 44:12.960]  Oh, I can't wait.
[44:13.040 --> 44:17.980]  I can't wait to see what's going to be in the actual program.
[44:17.980 --> 44:22.040]  And I just would also remind people there are other ways to participate.
[44:22.240 --> 44:34.000]  If you can't maybe do an entire talk yourself or you just kind of want to get a sense of what the conference is about maybe before maybe going that far, there's tons of other ways.
[44:34.120 --> 44:37.440]  I mean, we have workshops, we have projects, we have vendors.
[44:37.440 --> 44:57.800]  If you have a new item or idea that you think the hacker community might appreciate, we'll provide space for you and pretty much all kinds of contribution to the event is open and we're listening, we're ready.
[44:58.120 --> 45:04.080]  We want to integrate everybody's ideas and have a really successful, positive event.
[45:04.220 --> 45:11.060]  Well, I can say that every show pretty much from this point on is going to be about the Hope Conference, the upcoming Hope Conference in one way or another.
[45:11.060 --> 45:16.980]  Steve, of course, is a big part of that because of his extended talks about privacy and surveillance and investigation and all that.
[45:17.060 --> 45:18.420]  But we'll be talking with other people as well.
[45:18.660 --> 45:24.160]  I should also point out Corey Doctorow is our keynote, one of our keynotes for the 11th Hope Conference.
[45:24.900 --> 45:27.120]  And we have a whole number of other...
[45:27.120 --> 45:29.180]  Richard Stallman, I know, is giving a talk as well.
[45:29.300 --> 45:35.260]  We have all kinds of people that are going to be showing up and presenting amazing material.
[45:35.660 --> 45:36.060]  Lockpickers?
[45:36.760 --> 45:38.100]  Lockpickers will be there, of course.
[45:38.100 --> 45:39.820]  And we're going to have a lot of bandwidth, too.
[45:40.000 --> 45:48.300]  So if you have a project that uses internet connectivity, we'd like you to show off and bring your ideas for using bandwidth.
[45:48.440 --> 45:49.760]  More bandwidth than you can imagine.
[45:49.920 --> 45:50.620]  We'll have a lot.
[45:50.780 --> 45:50.980]  Yeah.
[45:51.220 --> 45:51.460]  Yeah.
[45:51.480 --> 45:53.140]  We'd like to do more with that.
[45:53.360 --> 45:55.260]  So really exciting stuff.
[45:55.660 --> 46:00.780]  Anything computers and telephony, social stuff, whatever you can think of.
[46:00.900 --> 46:05.320]  That is really what Hope is about, is bringing ideas and people together and sharing.
[46:05.320 --> 46:06.020]  Yes.
[46:06.380 --> 46:10.540]  Again, hope.net, www.hope.net or xi.hope.net.
[46:10.680 --> 46:11.680]  It all goes to the same place.
[46:11.960 --> 46:13.220]  All the information is there.
[46:13.380 --> 46:15.040]  We'll be updating that on a regular basis.
[46:15.040 --> 46:16.660]  But it's really, it's starting to get exciting.
[46:16.820 --> 46:18.420]  Yeah, it's also hopeconf on Twitter.
[46:18.660 --> 46:19.340]  Oh, that's right.
[46:19.500 --> 46:21.280]  Hope, H-O-P-E-C-O-N-F.
[46:21.640 --> 46:22.940]  Follow that, for sure.
[46:23.080 --> 46:23.560]  Follow that.
[46:23.680 --> 46:26.940]  And you'll get all kinds of other updates as well.
[46:27.060 --> 46:28.000]  Bernie, anything to add to this?
[46:28.600 --> 46:41.480]  It's just, there's just so much, as Rob was saying, there's just so many great talk and panel proposals and workshop proposals and projects and films and just so much stuff going on.
[46:41.780 --> 46:54.040]  And thousands of people, all really curious people that listen to this show and just try to find out interesting stuff you can't find out anywhere else, you can find it out at the Hope Conference.
[46:54.040 --> 46:59.120]  If you check out hope.net, you can read more about it, find out how to get there, how to get a ticket.
[46:59.460 --> 47:06.180]  But it's, you know, we're going to talk a lot about it between now and July 22nd, 23rd, and 24th when it happens.
[47:06.640 --> 47:07.900]  But it's always amazing.
[47:08.200 --> 47:08.960]  It's so much work.
[47:09.000 --> 47:10.840]  We can only put it together every two years.
[47:11.000 --> 47:13.740]  But it's worth waiting for, I'll tell you.
[47:13.880 --> 47:15.180]  So go check it out.
[47:15.380 --> 47:16.080]  Here's an idea.
[47:16.080 --> 47:21.280]  Maybe somebody will submit a talk for transit systems around the world, like we were talking about earlier.
[47:22.040 --> 47:22.400]  Yeah.
[47:22.640 --> 47:23.560]  I'd go to that talk.
[47:24.040 --> 47:24.900]  Yeah, I would, too.
[47:25.240 --> 47:35.980]  So if you are really familiar with mass transit systems around the world, or just around this country, all the different systems just in this country, please submit it to us.
[47:36.200 --> 47:41.620]  Should they send it to OTH at 2600.com, or should they send it to speakers at hope.net?
[47:41.720 --> 47:43.220]  I want to just give out all our email addresses.
[47:43.360 --> 47:49.260]  No, they should probably send it to the speakers list, the speaker submission email address, which is speakers at hope.net.
[47:49.260 --> 47:54.420]  But before they do that, they should read the guidelines which appear on the hope.net web page.
[47:54.540 --> 48:01.120]  Otherwise, they might do something that would make us laugh at them, and otherwise they'd feel foolish.
[48:01.320 --> 48:19.740]  We have a whole set of tips, speaker tips, with guidelines on, you know, how long, not necessarily how long it can be, but what to include, what not to include, try not to include attachments if you can help it, that sort of thing, so that we can interpret it more easily and get back to you more quickly.
[48:19.900 --> 48:25.140]  Some of our staff really don't like doc files, so that's something to avoid, too, if you possibly can.
[48:25.640 --> 48:27.120]  Don't send us doc files.
[48:27.820 --> 48:35.780]  And, you know, talk more about what it is you want to talk about rather than your various degrees or accomplishments in your life.
[48:35.860 --> 48:40.340]  We care, but it's the talk that we're considering.
[48:40.340 --> 48:45.820]  And we're specifically not interested in something you're coming to say, to sell us, or to sell the audience.
[48:46.040 --> 48:47.680]  This is not a commercial conference.
[48:47.860 --> 48:48.120]  Yes.
[48:48.260 --> 48:51.940]  This is not where corporations come and talk about their latest, greatest new product.
[48:52.300 --> 48:54.380]  That's not what this conference is about at all.
[48:54.480 --> 48:54.700]  No.
[48:54.800 --> 48:59.820]  And if you submit something that says it's a motivational talk, it will have that effect on us.
[48:59.940 --> 49:04.360]  It will motivate us to say, nah, we're not going to consider this at all.
[49:05.160 --> 49:06.040]  People do that.
[49:06.160 --> 49:08.740]  And, you know, there's a place for it, but that place is not hope.
[49:09.940 --> 49:10.240]  Yep.
[49:10.340 --> 49:12.440]  Well, there's a lot of other activities, too.
[49:12.560 --> 49:13.960]  I'm thinking of all the broadcasting.
[49:14.180 --> 49:15.300]  There's amateur radio.
[49:16.080 --> 49:17.100]  That's going to be there.
[49:17.220 --> 49:30.520]  There's also Radio Statler, which does broadcasting at the event, which will be online and in other forms, I'm sure, with all kinds of scheduled and unscheduled things going on in their broadcast facilities on site.
[49:31.060 --> 49:36.400]  A lot of our different news outlets that we've mentioned will synchronize.
[49:36.400 --> 49:41.980]  People are starting to share and get excited about all this stuff.
[49:42.220 --> 49:47.960]  And, yeah, basically, xi.hope.net is the one place to find out all the details.
[49:48.000 --> 49:53.140]  And, yeah, we'll share as things develop here.
[49:53.140 --> 49:59.000]  Okay, now, we want to go into this long-promised Steve Rambam piece.
[49:59.060 --> 49:59.780]  But you know what?
[49:59.860 --> 50:00.500]  I have them.
[50:00.660 --> 50:01.560]  I have six of them.
[50:01.760 --> 50:03.880]  And I didn't write down what conferences they're from.
[50:04.000 --> 50:06.460]  So, Kyle, pick a number from one to six, and I'll just play that one.
[50:07.280 --> 50:07.720]  Three.
[50:08.040 --> 50:08.280]  Three?
[50:08.480 --> 50:08.620]  Okay.
[50:08.740 --> 50:13.000]  Hang on while I spin the dial here to get number three up.
[50:14.620 --> 50:15.060]  Okay.
[50:15.560 --> 50:16.580]  Number three it is.
[50:17.020 --> 50:19.680]  Here's the voice of Steve from one of the Hope Conferences.
[50:19.700 --> 50:21.160]  We'll try and figure out which one it is.
[50:21.780 --> 50:23.500]  Okay, if we could have your attention.
[50:23.800 --> 50:24.060]  Ready?
[50:24.800 --> 50:25.420]  Everybody here?
[50:25.560 --> 50:25.660]  Good.
[50:26.740 --> 50:28.940]  Welcome to the final talk of the Hope Conference.
[50:30.620 --> 50:31.060]  It's...
[50:35.860 --> 50:38.580]  I want to thank you all for braving the elements to get here.
[50:38.580 --> 50:41.480]  I want to thank Stephens for allowing us to be here.
[50:41.780 --> 50:45.340]  I want to thank Arsene for arranging all of this and making it possible.
[50:51.370 --> 50:59.010]  And, of course, the person to really thank is the person who stuck through a lot of hell in July and came back to give the talk that he wasn't able to give in July.
[50:59.610 --> 51:00.390]  Steve Rambam.
[51:02.490 --> 51:03.190]  Thank you.
[51:06.550 --> 51:11.150]  As Eric pointed out, this is quite a bit of unfinished business.
[51:11.730 --> 51:14.430]  Three months late, but better late than never.
[51:15.020 --> 51:16.650]  Where is Arsene, by the way?
[51:19.450 --> 51:23.870]  Before I start, I just very much want to thank Arsene for setting this up.
[51:24.010 --> 51:26.430]  I got an email from him out of the blue.
[51:26.670 --> 51:28.890]  He said, I understand that...
[51:28.890 --> 51:30.370]  No idea who he was.
[51:30.550 --> 51:33.910]  Didn't have any affiliation with 2600 that I knew of.
[51:34.310 --> 51:36.570]  He sent an email to me.
[51:36.570 --> 51:39.130]  I think I was actually in the Far East at the time.
[51:41.830 --> 51:53.710]  And it said something along the lines of, my name is Arsene Lebedev, and I would like you to come to Stevens Institute of Technology and give this speech.
[51:54.550 --> 51:56.270]  And we emailed back and forth.
[51:56.490 --> 52:01.990]  And first of all, I didn't believe that somebody with the name Arsene Lebedev existed.
[52:03.410 --> 52:07.170]  And basically, he just kept saying, come to Stevens on the 16th.
[52:07.250 --> 52:08.210]  Everything will be fine.
[52:08.410 --> 52:09.870]  And, you know, can you make it?
[52:09.950 --> 52:11.050]  How big a room do you need?
[52:11.270 --> 52:14.030]  And I'm thinking like, yeah, sure, Borat.
[52:14.030 --> 52:15.070]  I'm going to fall for this.
[52:15.070 --> 52:24.870]  You know, I expected to come here and find a guy in a shiny gold thong with a wrestling bear or something, but...
[52:24.870 --> 52:25.730]  It's tomorrow.
[52:25.870 --> 52:26.770]  That's tomorrow.
[52:27.110 --> 52:28.910]  Come back after 12.
[52:31.870 --> 52:43.550]  The fact that this late in the game, with crappy weather, out of nowhere, that we have a standing room only crowd is entirely due to arseney.
[52:43.770 --> 52:47.390]  So give him money, buy him food, do something.
[52:51.470 --> 52:56.550]  Let me very quickly tell you what we're doing here today.
[52:57.970 --> 53:09.490]  This is normally part of an eight-hour full-day course, which is half a day computer-aided investigation and half a day foreign investigation.
[53:09.490 --> 53:30.610]  The computer-aided investigation portion, which we've modified into a privacy seminar for 2600, is essentially designed to teach investigators law enforcement, people with a genuine need to know how to track people down and find things out about them,
[53:30.790 --> 53:33.070]  how to do it before they go out in the field.
[53:33.730 --> 53:43.610]  Computer-aided investigation and database access is now an essential part of any investigator or law enforcement officer's toolkit.
[53:44.090 --> 53:52.850]  And then in the afternoon, we move on to the foreign investigation portion of it, where we cover what to do if they have to go out of the country.
[53:54.570 --> 54:06.190]  Over the years, working with 2600, we've put together a speech, and we've realized that privacy is, in fact, the mirror image of database investigation.
[54:06.570 --> 54:16.950]  You can't talk about access to people's personal information, and you can't talk about who can access it without discussing what's out there and who should be able to access it.
[54:21.050 --> 54:28.890]  As part of the seminar that I was supposed to give 90 days ago and that I'm giving tonight, we asked for a volunteer.
[54:28.890 --> 54:38.810]  We asked for a victim, somebody to call in or write in and allow us to essentially invade his privacy, find out everything we could about him.
[54:39.370 --> 54:42.650]  And we got a number of volunteers.
[54:42.670 --> 54:49.810]  Most of them were people who were either too young or too nice to have any sort of history.
[54:51.610 --> 54:55.050]  Thank goodness a guy by the name of Rick Dakin volunteered.
[54:55.330 --> 54:59.710]  Now, Rick is very active in the online community.
[54:59.710 --> 55:00.690]  He's also a writer.
[55:00.810 --> 55:02.470]  He most recently wrote Geek Mafia.
[55:02.690 --> 55:04.090]  He's a pretty remarkable guy.
[55:04.090 --> 55:06.770]  And there's a ton of stuff about Rick.
[55:06.850 --> 55:15.310]  And Rick is a very colorful guy, so not all of it is just simple, where does he live and where does he work stuff, as you'll see.
[55:17.790 --> 55:26.870]  Because of Rick's cooperation, we were able to put together a program, which you'll see in a second, that allows us to talk about what's out there in private hands.
[55:27.350 --> 55:32.970]  Proprietary databases, corporate databases, credit bureaus, non-governmental databases.
[55:33.770 --> 55:46.650]  Let me just dismiss governmental databases today by saying, everything that you see us do here today, the government has 50 times as much, and they have access to everything that you're going to be seeing today.
[55:47.970 --> 56:03.850]  We're not going to talk about NCIC, FinCEN, which is where all your financial history is, TEX, TEX2, any of the incarnations of the databases used by what used to be Treasury, what's now Homeland Security, that sort of thing.
[56:03.950 --> 56:05.230]  We're not going to talk about that.
[56:05.330 --> 56:14.130]  We're going to talk about stuff that a skilled private investigator or a governmental investigator with access to private databases can access.
[56:16.650 --> 56:23.290]  What we're also not going to do today is, what I'm not going to do today, is have a point of view.
[56:23.810 --> 56:28.090]  I'm going to lay this out for you in as neutral a manner as possible.
[56:28.590 --> 56:38.190]  Now, granted, seven FBI agents and raid jackets coming in the first time I try to give this speech has sort of skewed my opinion somewhat.
[56:39.410 --> 56:53.810]  But still, I am not convinced that on one hand, all the databases need to be closed, or on the other hand, all the databases need to be open to the world.
[56:54.090 --> 56:58.730]  I mean, there are legitimate reasons for access, and we're going to be talking about that.
[56:58.890 --> 57:06.730]  So, as I say in all the talks I give, I'm not going to tell you what to think, but I am going to try to tell you what to think about.
[57:09.190 --> 57:13.870]  Database collection has been around forever, since the days of the Bible.
[57:14.050 --> 57:14.970]  People have been counted.
[57:15.290 --> 57:16.770]  People have been pigeonholed.
[57:16.910 --> 57:18.670]  People have been categorized.
[57:19.390 --> 57:21.790]  Here's what's different in the past 10 years.
[57:22.430 --> 57:24.610]  First of all, computing power and speed.
[57:25.550 --> 57:35.990]  I have now in my office more data and more data storage space than the FBI computers had 10 years ago.
[57:37.070 --> 57:44.010]  Storage space, you can go now to a store and get a 750 gig drive for, what, about 300 bucks.
[57:44.490 --> 57:57.830]  You can set up an array of computers that will process whatever data you gather so quickly that 10 years ago you would have had to use literally a Cray supercomputer to do the equivalent amount of computing.
[58:01.270 --> 58:04.950]  Everything, everything is now in digital format.
[58:05.250 --> 58:16.210]  Everything you do when you fill out an application, when you buy an item, when you make a telephone call, when you go through an easy pass lane or use a metro card.
[58:16.670 --> 58:28.210]  Everything is already in digital format, which means taking it, putting it in a database, analyzing it and indexing it, never has to be touched by human hands.
[58:29.050 --> 58:35.870]  You today, not some third party typing in front of a terminal, you are contributing all the data about you.
[58:37.270 --> 58:37.950]  data.
[58:37.950 --> 58:40.150]  OCR, optical character recognition.
[58:40.990 --> 58:51.490]  Even the old data, the stuff that's on paper forms 20 years ago, 30 years ago, is being OCRed at the speed of light and it's being sucked into databases.
[58:52.190 --> 58:53.350]  And why?
[58:53.610 --> 58:55.510]  Because data is worth money.
[58:56.090 --> 59:05.350]  You access a database, you typically pay a substantial flat rate to access that database, it's going to be thousands of dollars a month, or you pay per search.
[59:05.670 --> 59:13.750]  And the more hits the user gets, the more money the database provider gets and the happier they are.
[59:13.890 --> 59:17.670]  So they're going to keep sucking in info so you'll pay for access to it.
[59:21.070 --> 59:31.810]  People are also willingly, and we're going to talk about this in great detail tonight, people are also willingly contributing enormous amounts of personal data about themselves.
[59:32.030 --> 59:35.030]  And when I say personal, I don't mean their address and phone number.
[59:35.190 --> 59:37.090]  I mean ridiculously personal things.
[59:37.310 --> 59:53.510]  You go to MySpace pages, people talk about drug use, sexual activity, religion, you know, sexual orientation, politics, things they won't tell their own family, anybody who accesses their MySpace page is going to be able to determine immediately.
[59:53.730 --> 01:00:08.010]  And by the way, all of that data, there are bots right now, my bots, other people's bots, running through MySpace, running through Friendster, running through Bebo and everything else, sucking down that information and categorizing it.
[01:00:08.650 --> 01:00:09.710]  Okay, okay.
[01:00:10.210 --> 01:00:15.030]  So that was Steven Rambam when we figured it out from 2006, 10 years ago.
[01:00:15.730 --> 01:00:24.410]  And as you can see, there are some things that are dated, but the dated things are the names of the products like MySpace and Friendster and things like that, not the ideas behind it.
[01:00:24.950 --> 01:00:31.290]  So that was excerpt here on WBAI New York where it's eight o'clock and we are extending an hour.
[01:00:31.390 --> 01:00:35.770]  If you're tuning in for the personal computer show, you'll be very disappointed because they are not on tonight.
[01:00:36.050 --> 01:00:37.310]  I think they're on next week.
[01:00:37.470 --> 01:00:42.070]  So hopefully you'll tune in then and they might even be on for longer next week to make up for this.
[01:00:42.710 --> 01:00:45.550]  I'm happy to say Steve Rambam is joining us live.
[01:00:45.750 --> 01:00:46.250]  Welcome, Steve.
[01:00:46.410 --> 01:00:47.910]  I hope your travel wasn't too painful.
[01:00:48.270 --> 01:00:49.890]  No, I managed to find a cab.
[01:00:50.030 --> 01:00:50.530]  Good, good.
[01:00:50.530 --> 01:00:57.070]  Now I'm here to tell all the personal computer aficionados why their machine is plotting to kill them.
[01:00:57.430 --> 01:00:57.670]  Yeah.
[01:00:57.870 --> 01:00:58.950]  Well, people need to hear that.
[01:00:59.530 --> 01:01:00.330]  It's important.
[01:01:00.830 --> 01:01:08.570]  But we were also having a discussion off mic about transit because we were talking about transit earlier in the show.
[01:01:09.070 --> 01:01:13.570]  And you had a very interesting statement about surveillance and transit here in New York City.
[01:01:13.570 --> 01:01:15.910]  I don't know why you would find it surprising.
[01:01:15.910 --> 01:01:24.610]  What I said was that any way that you try to get from point A to point B in the city of New York, you are going to be surveilled.
[01:01:24.850 --> 01:01:26.610]  You are going to be observed.
[01:01:27.190 --> 01:01:31.810]  And they, and I hate to use the word they because it makes me sound like a black helicopter guy.
[01:01:32.050 --> 01:01:34.350]  So by they, let me be very, very specific.
[01:01:34.570 --> 01:01:50.790]  The city of New York and the NYPD will know that a manual is going from point A to point B, either in his vehicle, because the ALPR is going to pick it up, automatic license plate readers, which are now everywhere, on the back of many of the police cars,
[01:01:50.950 --> 01:01:52.570]  hundreds of the police cars.
[01:01:52.570 --> 01:02:02.490]  For people who don't know what I'm talking about, if you see a police car with those two weird forward facing cameras on the rear trunk, those are ALPR cameras, automatic license plate readers.
[01:02:02.750 --> 01:02:08.550]  They can do 60,000 license plates per hour, each one of those cars or each one of the cameras.
[01:02:08.710 --> 01:02:10.210]  And there are choke points.
[01:02:11.250 --> 01:02:21.010]  If you go to the busier train stations now, you will see Spico cameras with wireless transmission back to the mothership.
[01:02:21.110 --> 01:02:35.330]  You'll see a box that says NYPD on it with two globes below it, which are 360-degree 24-hour day-night cameras that are broadcasting to the NYPD command center.
[01:02:35.470 --> 01:02:36.650]  I forget what the heck it's called.
[01:02:36.730 --> 01:02:37.470]  I used to know that.
[01:02:37.570 --> 01:02:39.930]  There's some obnoxious name for it.
[01:02:41.910 --> 01:02:56.310]  If you're going by foot, either those cameras are going to pick you up or there's now a public-private partnership where just last year, the NYPD added 4,000 cameras that were linked to them by private industry.
[01:02:57.170 --> 01:03:12.750]  If you use, obviously, easy pass, not only is easy pass recorded at the choke points, and NYPD is brilliant for setting up choke points, positions where you... locations where you must go through if you want to get from point A to point B.
[01:03:13.310 --> 01:03:27.210]  Not only will your easy pass be recorded at the choke points, but in Manhattan, there's easy pass readers in locations in Manhattan that's recording easy pass cars, easy pass equipped cars, driving past them.
[01:03:28.190 --> 01:03:33.730]  MetroCard, if you use a MetroCard, obviously, MetroCard is grabbed at the point you use it also.
[01:03:33.930 --> 01:03:45.650]  And if you've paid for it with a credit card or if somehow that MetroCard has been linked to you, like when you've been stopped and frisked and re-frisked and re-stopped, which by the way, I'm not opposed to.
[01:03:45.770 --> 01:03:48.470]  I'm opposed to some of the things that happen during the stop and frisk.
[01:03:48.670 --> 01:03:51.690]  But I think everybody should be frisked at least once a day.
[01:03:52.550 --> 01:03:53.670]  You know, it's...
[01:03:53.670 --> 01:03:53.810]  Once a day.
[01:03:53.990 --> 01:03:55.030]  At least once a day.
[01:03:55.250 --> 01:03:55.390]  Wow.
[01:03:55.410 --> 01:03:57.330]  Me, I'll volunteer for two or three times.
[01:03:58.030 --> 01:03:59.570]  Consider it kind of a hug, you know?
[01:03:59.850 --> 01:04:00.250]  Exactly.
[01:04:00.530 --> 01:04:01.950]  It's a... Exactly.
[01:04:01.950 --> 01:04:03.390]  It is an urban hug.
[01:04:03.830 --> 01:04:04.230]  Absolutely.
[01:04:05.270 --> 01:04:05.670]  Wow.
[01:04:05.870 --> 01:04:12.110]  Well, I'm sure that'll provoke some discussion, but it makes you think, though, about how much you are being watched.
[01:04:12.290 --> 01:04:15.690]  I mean, we used to think it was just London that did this, but now it's everywhere.
[01:04:16.090 --> 01:04:25.170]  Well, London is the... When it comes to deployment of technologies, England is the best.
[01:04:25.390 --> 01:04:29.990]  When it comes to development of technologies, Israel is the best.
[01:04:30.290 --> 01:04:32.210]  But America's very smart.
[01:04:32.390 --> 01:04:33.390]  America sits back.
[01:04:33.810 --> 01:04:36.510]  America behaves like every good technology user.
[01:04:36.690 --> 01:04:39.190]  It never buys version 1.0.
[01:04:39.430 --> 01:04:42.270]  It always waits till the bugs are taken out.
[01:04:42.410 --> 01:04:54.010]  And the surveillance technology, technologies that you see being deployed, especially in New York, but everywhere in America and by America, are very robust, very perfected technologies.
[01:04:54.110 --> 01:04:58.890]  By the time they're invading your privacy with them, they work great.
[01:04:59.070 --> 01:05:00.230]  They work great.
[01:05:00.590 --> 01:05:04.070]  They let them be developed in country A, tested in country B.
[01:05:04.470 --> 01:05:07.010]  DNA is from the United Kingdom before here.
[01:05:07.630 --> 01:05:11.250]  Camera surveillance technologies are from the United Kingdom before here.
[01:05:11.710 --> 01:05:17.450]  Many, many of the key critical technologies were beta tested, so to speak, in the UK.
[01:05:17.770 --> 01:05:19.730]  And then we brought them here once they were working great.
[01:05:19.890 --> 01:05:23.950]  So what is your advice to people who are concerned about their privacy?
[01:05:24.070 --> 01:05:25.470]  Is it just to accept this?
[01:05:25.470 --> 01:05:25.870]  Privacy is dead.
[01:05:26.010 --> 01:05:26.470]  Get over it.
[01:05:26.470 --> 01:05:27.670]  So that's really your message.
[01:05:27.710 --> 01:05:28.850]  But that really is my message.
[01:05:29.010 --> 01:05:33.690]  But more than that, look, I have a lot of messages connected to privacy.
[01:05:33.690 --> 01:05:36.590]  But first of all, it's not even privacy anymore.
[01:05:37.170 --> 01:05:40.150]  Privacy was 1.0.
[01:05:40.590 --> 01:05:42.650]  2.0 was anonymity.
[01:05:43.890 --> 01:05:51.670]  You might not have been able to be private, but you could go and put yourself in a little cyber bubble or personal bubble and be anonymous.
[01:05:51.850 --> 01:05:52.930]  You can't do that anymore.
[01:05:53.510 --> 01:05:54.390]  Anonymity is dead.
[01:05:54.510 --> 01:05:55.070]  Get over it.
[01:05:55.530 --> 01:05:57.770]  Now we're moving to 3.0.
[01:05:57.870 --> 01:06:01.110]  And this is one of the things that I'm going to be talking about at the HOPE conference.
[01:06:01.330 --> 01:06:14.330]  We are at the point where the technologies and the equipment and the software and the bots... And I'm going to sound like a nut here, but I'll detail it as I always do at the conference.
[01:06:15.250 --> 01:06:22.590]  So please withhold your opinion, listeners, until you hear the full presentation at HOPE.
[01:06:23.390 --> 01:06:27.610]  Now we're talking about the machines messing with your mind.
[01:06:28.490 --> 01:06:32.810]  Three weeks ago, there was an internal conference at Facebook.
[01:06:33.190 --> 01:06:39.370]  And the question was put to the weasel in chief, Zuckerberg.
[01:06:40.510 --> 01:06:45.110]  Should we do something to keep Trump from being elected president?
[01:06:45.590 --> 01:06:47.690]  That was actually a topic.
[01:06:47.690 --> 01:06:53.630]  And I've got the notes and the screenshot and everything, which, of course, I'll be putting up for everybody at HOPE.
[01:06:53.670 --> 01:06:54.370]  How did you get that?
[01:06:54.950 --> 01:06:56.010]  I'm a sneaky guy.
[01:06:56.670 --> 01:06:58.050]  But it's legit.
[01:06:58.050 --> 01:06:59.090]  I really vouch for it.
[01:06:59.090 --> 01:07:00.210]  I really vouch for it.
[01:07:03.050 --> 01:07:06.510]  Nobody who saw that, and believe me, I'm not the only person who saw that.
[01:07:06.590 --> 01:07:09.270]  By the time it got to me, it's been through about a hundred hands.
[01:07:09.370 --> 01:07:12.250]  And I'm sure if you Google it, it's got to be somewhere on the net by now.
[01:07:12.370 --> 01:07:22.170]  If I have it, you know, CNET has to have it, or as I call it, Ars Technica or whoever.
[01:07:22.330 --> 01:07:23.170]  A search is underway.
[01:07:23.470 --> 01:07:23.830]  Yes.
[01:07:26.170 --> 01:07:29.410]  What nobody has stopped to think is, hey, wait a second.
[01:07:30.190 --> 01:07:33.590]  If they ask that question, it means they can do that.
[01:07:34.170 --> 01:07:37.750]  The truth is, you now have entire ecosystems.
[01:07:38.090 --> 01:07:44.210]  You have a Google ecosystem, you have a Facebook ecosystem, you have a ferocious Apple ecosystem.
[01:07:44.210 --> 01:07:47.390]  They even restrict where you can pair your phone.
[01:07:47.750 --> 01:07:52.630]  They control what you see and how things are fed to you.
[01:07:52.850 --> 01:07:55.930]  You get news that Facebook thinks you should see.
[01:07:56.150 --> 01:07:59.570]  You get messages that Facebook thinks you can see.
[01:07:59.770 --> 01:08:06.250]  There are hidden message boxes on Facebook that you have hundreds of messages in that you've never seen.
[01:08:06.510 --> 01:08:13.670]  And by the way, thank God for that, because Facebook actually is really, really good at putting the crappy, annoying messages in the box you never check.
[01:08:14.070 --> 01:08:16.290]  But that's not a good excuse.
[01:08:17.570 --> 01:08:27.690]  You know, it's like the Librarians Association said about Google when Google was grabbing all the books and scanning them, you know, irrespective of copyright.
[01:08:27.870 --> 01:08:31.850]  They said it's like saying it's okay for you to break into my house because you're going to clean my kitchen.
[01:08:32.830 --> 01:08:36.490]  I mean, a little benefit for a big insult.
[01:08:38.130 --> 01:08:45.430]  You know, right now, your entire life is being manipulated in many ways.
[01:08:45.690 --> 01:08:52.090]  You are being pushed certain information that you have not independently curated.
[01:08:52.330 --> 01:08:54.530]  People have curated that for you.
[01:08:55.110 --> 01:08:58.910]  You are being pushed to reveal more and more information.
[01:08:59.170 --> 01:09:01.770]  Hey, you haven't posted a picture for a month.
[01:09:01.910 --> 01:09:04.370]  Don't you want to share something with your friends?
[01:09:04.870 --> 01:09:06.210]  No, I really don't.
[01:09:06.310 --> 01:09:08.670]  And frankly, they'll stay my friends if I don't.
[01:09:10.130 --> 01:09:15.950]  You know, I'm being a little flip as I always am when I go on your show because I'm among friends and I'm having a good time.
[01:09:16.130 --> 01:09:18.290]  But this is a terrifically serious issue.
[01:09:18.290 --> 01:09:18.410]  Yes.
[01:09:18.850 --> 01:09:20.810]  Destruction of privacy was a big deal.
[01:09:21.430 --> 01:09:24.730]  Destruction of anonymity was an exponentially bigger deal.
[01:09:24.990 --> 01:09:41.330]  You know, if I want to express a political opinion, if I want to own a firearm, if I want to support a certain candidate, if I want to be a friend to a disliked country, and so on and so on, I want to be able to do it anonymously.
[01:09:41.510 --> 01:09:42.890]  You can't do that anymore.
[01:09:43.150 --> 01:09:49.510]  Your ability to not reveal your politics and your habits and your hobbies are gone.
[01:09:49.850 --> 01:09:51.570]  So anonymity is now gone.
[01:09:51.770 --> 01:10:05.310]  Now we're talking about the ability to obtain sufficient information and the proper information and complete information, comprehensive information to make an informed decision.
[01:10:05.490 --> 01:10:23.030]  And I got to tell you, this is the biggest deal because the promise of the internet, the promise of this wire jacked into your computer coming into your house was, holy cow, I have access to the world's information.
[01:10:23.450 --> 01:10:25.770]  I can look at what I need to look at.
[01:10:25.830 --> 01:10:31.890]  I can access what I need to access and I can make an informed decision and I can make up my own mind.
[01:10:32.150 --> 01:10:41.090]  You know, truth is going to win because the real information, all sides of an argument are going to be available and I can make up my own mind.
[01:10:41.250 --> 01:10:42.270]  I'm not an idiot.
[01:10:42.430 --> 01:10:43.550]  I can make up my own mind.
[01:10:43.670 --> 01:10:48.670]  And that promise is now being shredded because Facebook is showing you what they want.
[01:10:49.450 --> 01:10:51.630]  Google News is showing you what they want.
[01:10:52.110 --> 01:10:58.130]  Apple is controlling the device that today you do most of your internet access on.
[01:10:58.290 --> 01:11:02.230]  Most people don't go to a terminal anymore and whip out the keypad.
[01:11:02.690 --> 01:11:08.990]  Most internet browsing and news access and social networking and all of that is now done on a smartphone.
[01:11:09.650 --> 01:11:12.070]  Most interaction period seems to be done on a smartphone.
[01:11:12.310 --> 01:11:16.410]  Well, not for me and old guys like me, but for the cool kids like you.
[01:11:16.550 --> 01:11:16.630]  Yes.
[01:11:16.830 --> 01:11:18.350]  Oh, no, don't say that because...
[01:11:18.350 --> 01:11:18.650]  I know.
[01:11:18.750 --> 01:11:19.670]  You have a flip phone.
[01:11:19.790 --> 01:11:21.210]  No, I had a flip phone.
[01:11:21.330 --> 01:11:23.470]  It flipped into pieces, but...
[01:11:23.470 --> 01:11:24.030]  What do you have now?
[01:11:24.050 --> 01:11:26.130]  I have a smartphone, but I barely use it.
[01:11:26.410 --> 01:11:26.490]  Which one?
[01:11:26.490 --> 01:11:30.830]  I'm not going to say on the radio what kind of phone I have or I won't have a phone by the end of the show.
[01:11:31.970 --> 01:11:34.190]  The thing is... How hard do you think it is to find out?
[01:11:34.530 --> 01:11:35.870]  It's probably not that hard.
[01:11:36.030 --> 01:11:37.870]  I mean, you send an email to somebody.
[01:11:38.170 --> 01:11:40.090]  Look in the email.
[01:11:40.270 --> 01:11:41.690]  It shows what devices came from.
[01:11:41.710 --> 01:11:42.750]  Yeah, but I don't send emails from my phone.
[01:11:42.850 --> 01:11:43.810]  That's one thing I just...
[01:11:43.810 --> 01:11:47.310]  My phone is for talking and for maybe sending a text message every now and then.
[01:11:47.430 --> 01:11:49.910]  It's not for staring at when I'm hanging out with other people.
[01:11:50.050 --> 01:11:52.810]  Do you realize what a ridiculous anachronism you are?
[01:11:52.810 --> 01:11:53.270]  I know.
[01:11:53.430 --> 01:11:54.130]  Well, I am too, by the way.
[01:11:54.130 --> 01:11:54.950]  I've told that many times.
[01:11:54.950 --> 01:11:55.830]  I am also.
[01:11:56.190 --> 01:11:57.670]  I'm buying a new iPhone.
[01:11:58.250 --> 01:11:59.770]  I'm going to the dark side.
[01:11:59.970 --> 01:12:01.330]  I'm buying a new iPhone.
[01:12:01.530 --> 01:12:09.910]  Because frankly, some of the apps, which by the way, let me just put it out there, 45% of all apps leach personal information.
[01:12:10.010 --> 01:12:10.210]  Yes.
[01:12:10.370 --> 01:12:11.130]  But you know what?
[01:12:11.610 --> 01:12:12.430]  Let them leach it.
[01:12:12.450 --> 01:12:13.830]  I'm enjoying some of these apps.
[01:12:14.090 --> 01:12:15.490]  I can imagine you are.
[01:12:15.570 --> 01:12:23.210]  But my question though is for those people listening who are currently unplugging their computers, if you simply disconnect from the internet, are you safe thing?
[01:12:23.370 --> 01:12:25.230]  First of all, you can't just unplug your computer.
[01:12:25.390 --> 01:12:26.610]  You have to unplug your thermostat.
[01:12:26.610 --> 01:12:28.070]  You have to unplug your refrigerator.
[01:12:28.230 --> 01:12:29.830]  You have to unplug your oven.
[01:12:30.050 --> 01:12:32.050]  You have to unplug your smoke detector.
[01:12:32.290 --> 01:12:34.170]  So the smart home is the danger.
[01:12:34.310 --> 01:12:39.570]  And like my friend's joke is, the internet of things is trying to kill me.
[01:12:40.050 --> 01:12:47.850]  The internet of things is invading your privacy in ways that, look, there's a diaper that tweets when your baby's wet.
[01:12:47.970 --> 01:12:49.030]  Oh, come on.
[01:12:50.130 --> 01:12:51.550]  Is this true?
[01:12:51.850 --> 01:12:52.770]  Yeah, it really is.
[01:12:52.770 --> 01:12:53.450]  I would not tell you.
[01:12:53.630 --> 01:12:53.870]  Huggies.
[01:12:54.190 --> 01:12:54.630]  Huggies.
[01:12:54.690 --> 01:13:03.030]  There's a diaper that... I mean, honestly, you have to be the world's most miserable parent to need to be... to have your baby's ass tweet you.
[01:13:03.230 --> 01:13:04.890]  But here's the best one.
[01:13:04.910 --> 01:13:05.490]  Well, it's not the ass.
[01:13:05.490 --> 01:13:06.530]  Technically, it's a diaper.
[01:13:06.770 --> 01:13:07.050]  Here's the best one.
[01:13:07.050 --> 01:13:08.310]  And I didn't...
[01:13:08.310 --> 01:13:13.910]  I spoke at a synagogue yesterday on this topic on internet privacy and security.
[01:13:14.030 --> 01:13:16.110]  So I couldn't put this example.
[01:13:16.310 --> 01:13:22.070]  And this is the best example of the internet thing... internet of things run amok.
[01:13:22.530 --> 01:13:26.090]  There is a Wi-Fi enabled rectal thermometer.
[01:13:27.210 --> 01:13:27.650]  Okay.
[01:13:27.950 --> 01:13:28.270]  All right.
[01:13:28.390 --> 01:13:29.270]  Now, I want you to...
[01:13:29.270 --> 01:13:30.130]  Keeping an open mind here.
[01:13:30.350 --> 01:13:34.270]  I'm not going to... I'm not going to elaborate on this because... because I'm a smart ass.
[01:13:34.990 --> 01:13:36.890]  But I've got to say... Is that part of the joke or...
[01:13:36.890 --> 01:13:37.110]  No.
[01:13:37.270 --> 01:13:37.470]  Okay.
[01:13:37.470 --> 01:13:38.870]  Oh, actually, very good.
[01:13:38.870 --> 01:13:39.890]  I didn't even get that.
[01:13:40.010 --> 01:13:40.250]  Okay.
[01:13:40.410 --> 01:13:40.890]  Very good.
[01:13:41.190 --> 01:13:48.990]  But I've got to say, you know, use a little imagination about somebody hacking your rectal thermometer.
[01:13:49.670 --> 01:13:50.830]  Yeah, I can...
[01:13:50.830 --> 01:13:52.630]  I mean, talk about making somebody your bitch.
[01:13:52.830 --> 01:13:53.150]  Really.
[01:13:53.550 --> 01:13:53.970]  Wow.
[01:13:54.290 --> 01:13:54.710]  Okay.
[01:13:54.830 --> 01:13:56.710]  Well, that's something to think about.
[01:13:56.710 --> 01:13:57.810]  By the way, it's a real thing.
[01:13:57.930 --> 01:13:58.630]  It's a real thing.
[01:13:58.830 --> 01:14:02.710]  You know, I come up with this crazy stuff because it's crazy to me.
[01:14:02.850 --> 01:14:03.750]  It entertains me.
[01:14:03.930 --> 01:14:06.250]  And I know that every other normal person...
[01:14:06.250 --> 01:14:17.430]  Not to say I'm necessarily normal, but every other normal person is going to go, geez, a tweeting diaper, a Wi-Fi-enabled rectal thermometer?
[01:14:17.770 --> 01:14:18.970]  What the heck?
[01:14:19.290 --> 01:14:19.630]  Mm-hmm.
[01:14:20.090 --> 01:14:20.390]  Okay.
[01:14:20.630 --> 01:14:20.850]  Go ahead.
[01:14:21.170 --> 01:14:28.190]  We... I think a couple of months back on the show mentioned there was an Internet of Things pregnancy test that was going around.
[01:14:28.310 --> 01:14:30.530]  That would be an app on your smartphone.
[01:14:30.770 --> 01:14:39.030]  But it's another one of these things where you really have to ask, you know, what's the benefit of having this, you know, connected to the Internet of Things, which isn't actually a thing.
[01:14:39.110 --> 01:14:41.750]  The Internet of Things is basically other people's computers in your house.
[01:14:42.430 --> 01:14:43.790]  That's absolutely right.
[01:14:43.910 --> 01:14:56.990]  But for people who, like, maybe just tuned in, because we talked a little bit about your work during the first hour, but for people who just tuned in for the second hour, could you quickly describe, like, the work you do and what leads you to this field of expertise?
[01:14:57.230 --> 01:14:57.970]  Okay, sure.
[01:14:58.030 --> 01:15:01.450]  Welcome to Steve Rombaum's College of Criminal Knowledge.
[01:15:01.450 --> 01:15:04.110]  Um, I am an investigator.
[01:15:04.110 --> 01:15:05.150]  I've been an investigator.
[01:15:05.150 --> 01:15:07.590]  I'm starting my 30th year in New York.
[01:15:08.010 --> 01:15:11.150]  I mean, it's mind-boggling how much time has passed.
[01:15:11.310 --> 01:15:14.490]  I've been hanging around with you guys for 22 years.
[01:15:14.730 --> 01:15:14.930]  It's amazing.
[01:15:15.230 --> 01:15:24.130]  I mean, there are people who have been born to the first HOPE conference attendees and now have children themselves.
[01:15:24.450 --> 01:15:28.590]  There are grandchildren of the people who heard my first HOPE talk.
[01:15:28.590 --> 01:15:30.330]  Well, let's not depress each other too much.
[01:15:30.330 --> 01:15:31.610]  It doesn't depress me.
[01:15:31.610 --> 01:15:32.590]  I'm feeling great.
[01:15:33.130 --> 01:15:37.810]  Um, I got a little head cold and some other maladies, but other than that, I'm feeling good.
[01:15:37.930 --> 01:15:38.130]  Okay.
[01:15:38.510 --> 01:15:44.190]  Um, you know, time has flown, but I've been an investigator for more than 30 years.
[01:15:44.390 --> 01:15:46.190]  I've got a lot of experience overseas.
[01:15:46.190 --> 01:15:48.590]  I still do about 50% of my work overseas.
[01:15:49.310 --> 01:15:54.110]  Uh, I've done a lot of interesting investigations in the public interest.
[01:15:54.290 --> 01:15:57.330]  Uh, you know about one of them, the Nazi war crime stuff that I did.
[01:15:57.490 --> 01:15:57.590]  Yeah.
[01:15:57.750 --> 01:16:00.190]  And I mentioned that because tomorrow is Yom HaShoah.
[01:16:00.310 --> 01:16:02.050]  It's Holocaust Remembrance Day.
[01:16:02.670 --> 01:16:08.470]  And, uh, I, I never liked the idea of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
[01:16:08.550 --> 01:16:12.110]  I think you should be remembering it a lot more than, than once a year.
[01:16:12.390 --> 01:16:13.510]  Uh, and I did.
[01:16:13.710 --> 01:16:22.850]  And I went out and I hunted down Nazi war criminals, found 170 of them, uh, interviewed a bunch of them undercover because at that time I was busy being an undercover agent.
[01:16:22.990 --> 01:16:28.370]  So I took the ID that I was using, working with the feds and went and found a few Nazis.
[01:16:28.610 --> 01:16:29.370]  And where'd you find them?
[01:16:29.970 --> 01:16:30.970]  Mostly in Canada.
[01:16:31.530 --> 01:16:31.970]  Canada?
[01:16:32.170 --> 01:16:32.950]  Mostly in Canada.
[01:16:33.150 --> 01:16:43.810]  You know, when I, when I started doing war crimes investigation, I believe the same misinformation that everyone else does, that the Nazis are hiding, they got plastic surgery.
[01:16:44.090 --> 01:16:56.690]  They have little villages in Brazil where everybody does Sigh Heil every morning and, and, and that basically they're desperately trying to hide from the Mossad and Simon Wiesenthal who's hunting them down.
[01:16:56.850 --> 01:16:57.850]  And here's the truth.
[01:16:58.050 --> 01:17:00.350]  First of all, none of them are trying to hide.
[01:17:00.990 --> 01:17:02.730]  Uh, they have nothing to fear.
[01:17:03.090 --> 01:17:03.910]  Nobody hunted them.
[01:17:04.270 --> 01:17:07.110]  The Mossad stopped looking for them decades ago.
[01:17:07.410 --> 01:17:11.370]  The Simon Wiesenthal center is not a Nazi hunting organization.
[01:17:11.570 --> 01:17:13.170]  Never was a Nazi hunting organization.
[01:17:13.450 --> 01:17:20.510]  If you go to Rabbi Marvin Heyer, their director, he'll say, you know, Simon Wiesenthal was a Nazi hunter, but no, we don't hunt Nazis.
[01:17:20.670 --> 01:17:21.910]  We're an educational foundation.
[01:17:22.790 --> 01:17:25.570]  Um, nobody was hunting Nazis, nobody.
[01:17:26.030 --> 01:17:30.950]  And they were living quite openly in the U S in Canada, in Britain, and in Australia.
[01:17:31.190 --> 01:17:43.490]  Most of them were smart enough to come to the West because the ones that stayed in, in the part of Europe that fell behind the iron curtain, which is where most of these atrocities occurred during the Holocaust.
[01:17:43.970 --> 01:17:51.070]  KGB came, not a whole lot of, uh, uh, uh, uh, access to the justice system.
[01:17:51.290 --> 01:17:54.170]  All of those, these people were thrown in graves with their victims.
[01:17:54.490 --> 01:17:59.350]  The one good thing the Soviet Union ever did was how they handled Nazi war criminals.
[01:17:59.490 --> 01:18:00.150]  The only thing.
[01:18:00.150 --> 01:18:04.690]  I'm surprised to hear that there wasn't, um, a hunt for them in this part of the world though.
[01:18:04.910 --> 01:18:06.110]  I was surprised also.
[01:18:06.270 --> 01:18:20.870]  And I have to tell you, as, as a Jewish person, um, I think it's a, it's a black mark on the honor of the Jewish community that, that these people were able to move into major urban areas, very often living cheek to cheek with the Jewish community.
[01:18:21.130 --> 01:18:32.770]  I mean, New York, Massachusetts, the Northeast, in Canada, they, they centered in, in Montreal and in Toronto, which is where the major Jewish communities are in Toronto.
[01:18:33.170 --> 01:18:35.670]  Uh, I went, I found a Nazi war criminal once.
[01:18:35.870 --> 01:18:46.070]  Uh, I went to the house and I said, we must be in the wrong place because there was a mezuzah, the, the item that Jews put on their doors on the door of this Nazi's house.
[01:18:46.530 --> 01:18:53.030]  And what I learned was downstairs was the landlord, who was a religious Jewish guy, and upstairs was the war criminal.
[01:18:53.690 --> 01:18:55.930]  And, and the downstairs landlord never knew.
[01:18:56.650 --> 01:18:58.010]  Until you came along and...
[01:18:58.010 --> 01:19:01.250]  Well, it was, it was an interesting, uh, conversation.
[01:19:01.350 --> 01:19:02.370]  Well, yeah, I'm curious about that.
[01:19:02.430 --> 01:19:03.370]  How's the conversation go?
[01:19:03.450 --> 01:19:04.970]  You say, hey, you're a Nazi war criminal.
[01:19:04.970 --> 01:19:05.990]  Did they say, so what?
[01:19:06.070 --> 01:19:06.690]  It's not a big deal.
[01:19:06.730 --> 01:19:07.970]  No, I, I was undercover.
[01:19:08.330 --> 01:19:10.030]  I took the name Salvatore Romano.
[01:19:10.190 --> 01:19:12.870]  I couldn't go, I'm Steve Rombaum, Jewish guy from Brooklyn.
[01:19:12.870 --> 01:19:13.470]  Same initials though.
[01:19:13.750 --> 01:19:17.090]  Well, and that's because I had monogrammed shirts and I was too cheap.
[01:19:17.310 --> 01:19:18.190]  That's really true.
[01:19:18.190 --> 01:19:19.390]  No, that's really true.
[01:19:19.970 --> 01:19:28.010]  And, uh, and I would knock on their door and I would tell them I was a professor at St. Paul's University of the Americas, which was a dummy university.
[01:19:28.010 --> 01:19:29.450]  It was set up down in Belize.
[01:19:29.990 --> 01:19:35.030]  Belize is, is basically fraudster central.
[01:19:35.330 --> 01:19:39.190]  You can go down there and set up anonymous bank accounts and anonymous corporations.
[01:19:39.450 --> 01:19:43.710]  All the people who are being outed in the Panama papers were amateurs.
[01:19:44.350 --> 01:19:45.570]  They should have gone to Belize.
[01:19:45.570 --> 01:19:46.890]  But you can't be anonymous anymore.
[01:19:47.430 --> 01:19:48.650]  You can in Belize.
[01:19:48.870 --> 01:19:49.150]  Okay.
[01:19:49.210 --> 01:19:50.150]  See, I got this out of you.
[01:19:50.250 --> 01:19:51.970]  Well, your money can be anonymous.
[01:19:52.210 --> 01:19:54.530]  Your money can be anonymous, but let's be clear.
[01:19:54.750 --> 01:19:55.550]  Let's be clear.
[01:19:55.630 --> 01:19:57.130]  We're also now in the Snowden area.
[01:19:57.710 --> 01:20:01.130]  So everybody is dumping data.
[01:20:01.490 --> 01:20:06.310]  This wasn't hacking this, this Panama papers from, from the law firm.
[01:20:06.550 --> 01:20:14.650]  This was somebody who was outraged, who had, who had access to the data and sent it to a couple of newspapers.
[01:20:14.950 --> 01:20:16.670]  And then, of course, the people were screwed.
[01:20:16.670 --> 01:20:17.890]  And now there's a big hullabaloo.
[01:20:18.190 --> 01:20:27.790]  Now, I have to tell you, most of the things that are revealed in these great exposés, you have to look at it and say, did anybody not already know this?
[01:20:28.070 --> 01:20:33.490]  Did people not know that leaders of foreign countries hide their money and screw their citizens?
[01:20:33.750 --> 01:20:34.510]  Yeah, that was my reaction, too.
[01:20:34.510 --> 01:20:35.870]  This is a revelation?
[01:20:37.150 --> 01:20:37.750]  Mm-hmm.
[01:20:38.270 --> 01:20:38.750]  Wow.
[01:20:39.070 --> 01:20:39.410]  Well, okay.
[01:20:39.510 --> 01:20:41.230]  So you told us something about your early days.
[01:20:41.350 --> 01:20:47.070]  I'm very curious, though, about how you got started in the private eye world in the first place.
[01:20:47.070 --> 01:20:53.030]  And also, what it was like then compared to now, as far as how, what tools you had available to you.
[01:20:53.030 --> 01:20:54.350]  That's a terrific question.
[01:20:54.490 --> 01:21:01.330]  Actually, any changes in the last year with all this leaking and encryption run-ups, if it's affected anything at all?
[01:21:01.330 --> 01:21:04.890]  First of all, I have access to most of this stuff anyway.
[01:21:05.190 --> 01:21:14.390]  If I want to get information out of Belize or out of Panama, I just go, I fly there, I poke around, I get a contact.
[01:21:15.210 --> 01:21:16.470]  I'm a field guy.
[01:21:16.710 --> 01:21:25.410]  I know that today my image is a tech weenie because I speak at IT security events and I lecture on open source intelligence.
[01:21:25.590 --> 01:21:32.110]  And now I teach federal government investigators at undercover school, how to keep guys like me from outing them.
[01:21:32.350 --> 01:21:40.490]  You know, it's very, very hard today to be an undercover agent with facial recognition and being able to check back 20 years in somebody's life.
[01:21:40.630 --> 01:21:44.130]  Somebody comes to you and says, you know, I'm Frankie Lasagna.
[01:21:44.330 --> 01:21:45.750]  I'm a mob guy from Miami.
[01:21:46.510 --> 01:21:48.490]  Google will tell you if it's true or not.
[01:21:48.730 --> 01:21:50.690]  Very, very tough to be an undercover guy.
[01:21:50.850 --> 01:21:52.710]  I take a picture of you, Emmanuel.
[01:21:53.450 --> 01:21:57.530]  I put it into Google image search or TinEye or something we have in our office.
[01:21:57.730 --> 01:21:59.810]  I can identify you just from your photo.
[01:22:00.050 --> 01:22:09.750]  Your photo can give me your name, your address, your phone, your date of birth, your social security number, what books you read, what movies you listen to, all of that.
[01:22:10.230 --> 01:22:11.010]  I'm lucky.
[01:22:11.270 --> 01:22:14.490]  When I started, I started in an analog world.
[01:22:15.010 --> 01:22:22.550]  When you needed to trace a phone number for a case, you had to either have a guy at the phone company, which I did.
[01:22:22.870 --> 01:22:25.650]  There was a number in Albany that you could call.
[01:22:25.750 --> 01:22:27.810]  You would give a code number and it would give you the CNA.
[01:22:27.850 --> 01:22:28.750]  Oh, the CNA number.
[01:22:28.850 --> 01:22:28.990]  Yeah.
[01:22:29.250 --> 01:22:30.250]  518-471.
[01:22:30.910 --> 01:22:31.270]  Okay.
[01:22:31.430 --> 01:22:31.570]  Correct.
[01:22:32.090 --> 01:22:32.830]  474 something.
[01:22:33.050 --> 01:22:33.810]  I forget what it was.
[01:22:34.030 --> 01:22:35.110]  It ended in three ones, I think.
[01:22:35.350 --> 01:22:35.610]  Maybe.
[01:22:35.790 --> 01:22:35.910]  Yeah.
[01:22:36.090 --> 01:22:37.030]  I don't even remember.
[01:22:37.230 --> 01:22:55.790]  But, you know, back then you either had to have the CNA number or you had to do, if it wasn't in the local New York telephone company area, you had to go... and if you go to the New York Public Library, you're going to see grooves in the steps as you walk up between the lines.
[01:22:55.930 --> 01:23:03.810]  I want to tell you, those grooves in the steps are an endless line of private investigators walking into the library and accessing the...
[01:23:03.810 --> 01:23:04.830]  Kohl's directories.
[01:23:04.850 --> 01:23:06.890]  Kohl's and the Hanes and the Polk directories.
[01:23:06.890 --> 01:23:09.470]  I remember spending time in libraries going through the Kohl's directories.
[01:23:09.470 --> 01:23:12.150]  Well, I started out everything analog.
[01:23:12.510 --> 01:23:14.610]  I learned cameras shooting film.
[01:23:14.890 --> 01:23:18.250]  I learned data looking in libraries.
[01:23:18.630 --> 01:23:22.650]  I learned interviewing by interviewing.
[01:23:23.090 --> 01:23:30.350]  Today, you know, you've got three groups of private investigators and law enforcement investigators today.
[01:23:30.630 --> 01:23:35.510]  You've got the old guys, the old hairbags, who are incredible in the street.
[01:23:35.670 --> 01:23:36.910]  They can find anybody.
[01:23:36.930 --> 01:23:39.210]  They could sell ice to an Eskimo.
[01:23:39.450 --> 01:23:41.850]  They are wonderful face-to-face.
[01:23:42.070 --> 01:23:45.830]  But when it comes to computers, they type with their thumbs, they don't know what to do.
[01:23:46.530 --> 01:23:49.970]  Then you've got the new guys who are database cowboys.
[01:23:50.210 --> 01:23:59.630]  If they can't find it through Google Foo or through NCIC or a database, if they can't send the drone out to surveil you, they're screwed.
[01:24:00.290 --> 01:24:08.050]  The guys who are the best, in my opinion, are people from my era, who know how to go out into the field and be real gumshoes.
[01:24:08.190 --> 01:24:15.270]  And at the same time, they know all the force multiplier methods, had a background to witness.
[01:24:15.550 --> 01:24:16.950]  You know, I was talking about this today.
[01:24:16.950 --> 01:24:23.570]  When I go to interview an important witness, I spend 20 minutes in front of the screen before I go and see them.
[01:24:23.670 --> 01:24:25.970]  And I learn everything I can about them.
[01:24:26.110 --> 01:24:27.450]  I learn their character.
[01:24:27.690 --> 01:24:29.470]  I learn what they care about.
[01:24:29.690 --> 01:24:31.550]  I learn their habits, their hobbies.
[01:24:31.910 --> 01:24:33.170]  Are they out of work?
[01:24:33.330 --> 01:24:34.970]  Are they an Obama supporter?
[01:24:35.150 --> 01:24:37.310]  Are they a Trump supporter?
[01:24:37.610 --> 01:24:40.570]  You know, how do they feel about this religion, that race?
[01:24:40.830 --> 01:24:47.090]  And by the time I get to their door, I've got my approach crafted that they're going to talk to me.
[01:24:47.390 --> 01:24:51.270]  And it really greatly increases my ability to get what I want.
[01:24:52.250 --> 01:24:58.990]  You've been really good over the years predicting things that will be happening in a few years.
[01:24:59.150 --> 01:25:02.750]  When you had your beginning, did you think it would be like this now?
[01:25:02.910 --> 01:25:04.730]  Or anything remotely like this?
[01:25:04.810 --> 01:25:04.810]  Oh yeah.
[01:25:04.870 --> 01:25:13.030]  Look, I mean, if you look at the video of some of my old Hope talks, you'll see I predicted Google Glasses 12 years ago.
[01:25:13.330 --> 01:25:18.090]  You'll see I talked about tracking license plates 15 years ago.
[01:25:18.270 --> 01:25:26.690]  I was talking about cell phone pinging when people didn't even understand when there were analog cell phones, before there were digital cell phones.
[01:25:27.650 --> 01:25:32.150]  Nobody at that time when I started talking about it, there wasn't even GPSA on phones.
[01:25:32.330 --> 01:25:33.850]  Skyhook was a big revelation.
[01:25:34.090 --> 01:25:37.470]  If you remember, the first iPhone was using Skyhook.
[01:25:37.550 --> 01:25:43.570]  And if you went across the Brooklyn Bridge, it showed your position in the water because of the Wi-Fi nodes.
[01:25:45.110 --> 01:25:49.250]  You know, I've been pretty darn accurate about predicting.
[01:25:49.470 --> 01:25:54.450]  I want to tell you that there is going to be machine man melding.
[01:25:54.450 --> 01:25:58.490]  People are going to get smart contact lenses, smart glasses.
[01:25:58.910 --> 01:26:12.430]  People are going to be able to get various attachments that they can wear or stick in their ear that are going to allow people to basically get massive amounts of information on the fly.
[01:26:12.930 --> 01:26:15.970]  The problem is going to be for the average small guy.
[01:26:16.430 --> 01:26:24.350]  The problem is going to be for somebody who really thinks that they're getting a legitimate news feed through Google or through Facebook.
[01:26:25.350 --> 01:26:34.190]  People are going to be molded into what Zuckerberg thinks the ideal human being should be.
[01:26:34.310 --> 01:26:42.790]  And I've got to tell you, there is absolutely zero difference between Facebook telling you what to think and Hitler telling you what to think.
[01:26:42.950 --> 01:26:43.810]  Well, okay.
[01:26:44.010 --> 01:26:46.530]  I mean, that might be a bit of an extreme comparison.
[01:26:46.530 --> 01:26:47.010]  No, it's not.
[01:26:47.150 --> 01:26:54.690]  But I agree in one... even if you 100% agree with Zuckerberg on something, you're not going to agree with him on something else.
[01:26:54.690 --> 01:26:56.310]  And he's still going to have that power.
[01:26:56.850 --> 01:26:59.130]  That's, I think, what the point is here.
[01:26:59.290 --> 01:27:04.990]  The thing that made America great was individual rights and individual independence.
[01:27:05.750 --> 01:27:12.170]  You know, I really am one of these people who believe in American exceptionalism, that there are special and unique things about America.
[01:27:12.370 --> 01:27:18.530]  In America, unlike Europe and the rest of the world, if I want to defend myself, I have the right to a firearm.
[01:27:18.730 --> 01:27:21.970]  I don't have to crawl to the government for my safety.
[01:27:22.310 --> 01:27:34.830]  If I want to know who donated to my congressman, and is my congressman, you know, under the control of some entity that I hugely disagree with, I can go and look it up.
[01:27:34.830 --> 01:27:46.150]  If I want to know what happened with a police interaction on the corner of Atlantic and Bond, presumably the truth is going to be in the local newspaper.
[01:27:46.350 --> 01:27:58.230]  But if all of that stuff is filtered, and it doesn't get to me raw, it doesn't get to me untouched and uncurated, there's a problem.
[01:27:58.230 --> 01:28:01.750]  And that's privacy invasion 3.0.
[01:28:02.290 --> 01:28:13.750]  1.0 was just plain old privacy invasion, gathering up data about people, you know, amalgamating it so that I could press a button and have the entire life story of Emanuel Goldstein.
[01:28:13.950 --> 01:28:16.050]  That was privacy invasion number one.
[01:28:16.170 --> 01:28:18.070]  And I ranted about that for a while.
[01:28:18.290 --> 01:28:20.430]  Actually, I don't think ranted is the right word.
[01:28:20.630 --> 01:28:24.510]  I spoke coherently about it for a number of years.
[01:28:24.510 --> 01:28:25.530]  Nobody seemed to care.
[01:28:26.330 --> 01:28:31.450]  For the past couple of years, and at the past Hope, I spoke about anonymity.
[01:28:32.590 --> 01:28:34.090]  Anonymity is a big deal.
[01:28:34.230 --> 01:28:39.190]  You have a right to have your life unknown.
[01:28:39.470 --> 01:28:42.170]  You have a right to have an anonymous political opinion.
[01:28:42.370 --> 01:28:48.810]  You have a right to not have cyber bullies knowing who you are and where you are, and cyber stalkers.
[01:28:48.950 --> 01:28:52.630]  You have a right to live your life without constant scrutiny.
[01:28:52.630 --> 01:28:54.650]  Anonymity is now gone.
[01:28:54.930 --> 01:29:01.370]  The next thing right now is the right to raw information.
[01:29:01.850 --> 01:29:03.470]  That's the big issue now.
[01:29:03.590 --> 01:29:05.630]  And this is the biggest issue.
[01:29:06.730 --> 01:29:07.110]  Amazing.
[01:29:07.730 --> 01:29:15.990]  We're talking with Steve Ramba, a private extraordinaire who's been giving talks at Hope Conferences since Hope Conferences began.
[01:29:16.690 --> 01:29:22.910]  And some of the things you say are really eye-opening as far as what we have to look forward to.
[01:29:23.790 --> 01:29:26.130]  And it just opens up a whole world of questions.
[01:29:26.250 --> 01:29:28.950]  Bernie, I haven't given you the opportunity to ask anything.
[01:29:30.390 --> 01:29:32.290]  Well, I was going to ask Steve.
[01:29:32.630 --> 01:29:33.270]  Hi, Steve, by the way.
[01:29:33.270 --> 01:29:33.830]  Hey, Bernie.
[01:29:34.410 --> 01:29:35.830]  Sorry I couldn't get you on the phone.
[01:29:35.850 --> 01:29:36.730]  I'm going to call you later.
[01:29:37.030 --> 01:29:37.530]  That's okay.
[01:29:37.630 --> 01:29:37.930]  Good, good.
[01:29:39.050 --> 01:29:46.190]  You're going to be speaking at the 11th Hope this July either 22nd, 23rd, or 24th.
[01:29:46.630 --> 01:29:48.390]  And... God and the FBI willing.
[01:29:49.810 --> 01:29:53.110]  Well, we know they're going to be there also, as they always are.
[01:29:53.730 --> 01:29:55.370]  And you just sort of give us a preview.
[01:29:55.910 --> 01:29:58.890]  Well, let me say they're definitely going to be at Hope.
[01:29:59.870 --> 01:30:04.710]  They're definitely going to be at Hope because I'm going to be, in large part, inviting them.
[01:30:05.810 --> 01:30:10.370]  We are going to have, you know, I'm educational chairman now of the Fraternal Order of Investigators.
[01:30:10.550 --> 01:30:12.990]  And we're doing something that's long overdue.
[01:30:13.270 --> 01:30:19.690]  I think that investigators, hackers, and journalists are all first cousins.
[01:30:19.950 --> 01:30:24.450]  We are all after the same thing, raw, unvarnished, free information.
[01:30:24.450 --> 01:30:39.190]  And I've reached out to the investigative community, and I've got to tell you, there is an enormous amount of positive feedback about a law enforcement and a private investigative and an intelligence contingent coming and supporting the Hope Conference.
[01:30:39.430 --> 01:30:47.970]  And I've got to believe we're going to have anywhere between 100 to 200 representatives of the professional investigative community at Hope for the first time.
[01:30:48.130 --> 01:30:51.450]  Now, that's something I just want to say to people.
[01:30:51.570 --> 01:30:52.930]  That's not something to be scared of.
[01:30:53.050 --> 01:30:54.710]  That's something that you can benefit from.
[01:30:54.850 --> 01:31:01.370]  You can learn from the knowledge that these people have and share your knowledge as well.
[01:31:01.510 --> 01:31:03.090]  Because, you know, we don't agree on everything.
[01:31:03.230 --> 01:31:05.670]  In fact, we probably fill a broadcast date with the things you and I don't agree on.
[01:31:05.670 --> 01:31:10.410]  But that's no reason to stop listening and stop learning.
[01:31:10.750 --> 01:31:14.550]  And the things that you bring to the community are invaluable.
[01:31:15.130 --> 01:31:16.470]  It's almost indescribable.
[01:31:16.590 --> 01:31:20.710]  I'm wondering what your impression is overall of the hacker community.
[01:31:21.190 --> 01:31:24.830]  Look, you know, to be blunt, I love you guys.
[01:31:24.830 --> 01:31:25.690]  I really do.
[01:31:25.870 --> 01:31:27.550]  I'm a very right wing guy.
[01:31:27.730 --> 01:31:28.790]  That's certainly no secret.
[01:31:29.610 --> 01:31:35.790]  My political views are completely different from about 75% of the people that come to Hope.
[01:31:36.090 --> 01:31:39.810]  I mean, I'm not supporting this moron who's going to be the Republican candidate.
[01:31:40.450 --> 01:31:42.310]  By the way, I just have to put this out there.
[01:31:42.470 --> 01:31:45.050]  Who the hell wants a New York landlord as president?
[01:31:45.590 --> 01:31:46.710]  That's a very good point.
[01:31:47.490 --> 01:31:52.970]  You know, speaking as a guy who rents an apartment in Brooklyn, trust me, I don't want a landlord as president.
[01:31:53.090 --> 01:31:55.490]  But let's move away from that because that's a whole show.
[01:31:55.530 --> 01:31:56.550]  No one's ever said that.
[01:31:56.670 --> 01:31:57.190]  That's important.
[01:31:57.530 --> 01:31:58.390]  Think of you a landlord.
[01:31:58.530 --> 01:31:59.410]  Do you want them to be president?
[01:31:59.410 --> 01:31:59.670]  Right.
[01:32:00.430 --> 01:32:04.570]  You know, do you want your landlord to have nuclear weapons at their control?
[01:32:04.830 --> 01:32:06.210]  Okay, now it's just being scary.
[01:32:06.350 --> 01:32:06.590]  Okay.
[01:32:06.790 --> 01:32:17.350]  So look, I mean, I'm a big fan of the hacker community because the truth is, the truth is, you guys support the important stuff.
[01:32:18.050 --> 01:32:22.790]  Freedom of action, freedom of information, individual independence.
[01:32:23.790 --> 01:32:40.210]  Whether you know it or not, you are much, much closer to my point of view regarding small government, regarding individual independence, regarding freedom of information, than most people.
[01:32:40.430 --> 01:32:42.170]  I mean, there's a lot in common.
[01:32:42.430 --> 01:32:46.350]  There's a lot... And I'll tell you something, you're the most welcoming guys around.
[01:32:46.610 --> 01:32:50.730]  I mean, I've never hid my political attitudes, never hid who I am.
[01:32:50.910 --> 01:32:59.810]  And I got to tell you, the hacker community has been, you know, as a group and individually, great friends to me for 22 years.
[01:33:00.010 --> 01:33:06.910]  I can tell you that I've solved some horrendous cases working with members of the hacker community.
[01:33:07.310 --> 01:33:12.170]  Bernie and I even worked on something together in Philly, a runaway girl.
[01:33:12.170 --> 01:33:13.470]  He gave me a bunch of advice.
[01:33:13.650 --> 01:33:19.330]  We tracked her through Wi-Fi nodes to Philly, and we were able to rescue her.
[01:33:20.750 --> 01:33:24.130]  You know, I feel very much at home in the hacker community.
[01:33:24.930 --> 01:33:30.150]  I don't agree with you at all about, for example, things like Snowden.
[01:33:30.830 --> 01:33:36.470]  But on the other hand, I can sit here and give you good reasons why I don't agree with you about Snowden.
[01:33:36.550 --> 01:33:37.970]  It's not a knee-jerk thing.
[01:33:38.110 --> 01:33:44.370]  I think that's something that people need to look at as far as, not just in situations like this, but in their daily lives.
[01:33:44.810 --> 01:33:50.190]  The people that you don't agree with, you might have a great deal to learn from them and to share with them.
[01:33:50.390 --> 01:33:52.770]  And it's important to keep that dialogue open.
[01:33:53.290 --> 01:33:58.850]  Too often, and I see this in our community as well, we just shut down when somebody we don't agree with... Yeah, you can't be a troll.
[01:33:58.990 --> 01:33:59.810]  You can't be a troll.
[01:33:59.970 --> 01:34:00.230]  Right.
[01:34:00.350 --> 01:34:02.450]  It's important to keep an open mind.
[01:34:02.470 --> 01:34:06.450]  I think in the hacker community, that's what appeals to you is the fact that we do listen.
[01:34:06.730 --> 01:34:07.330]  Very much.
[01:34:07.450 --> 01:34:08.330]  And I'll tell you something.
[01:34:09.190 --> 01:34:19.110]  My IQ goes up about 20 points when I leave a hope because the people there are just all whiplash smart and they're inquisitive and they want to learn about things.
[01:34:19.290 --> 01:34:19.610]  Yeah.
[01:34:19.710 --> 01:34:34.910]  And that's something I think is very basic in what would be called maybe the hacker outlook on things is to take something like the community where there are people who are maybe like a political 180 from you or who are just like from somewhere else who are maybe of a different lifestyle or whatever.
[01:34:35.150 --> 01:34:36.750]  Just all these differences we have between us.
[01:34:36.830 --> 01:34:38.110]  But there is such an eclectic crowd there.
[01:34:38.250 --> 01:34:46.630]  And it's very hacker-ish, I think, to mingle in a crowd like that and realize there are all these really interesting people that you can learn stuff you don't know yet from.
[01:34:46.850 --> 01:34:47.130]  That's right.
[01:34:47.330 --> 01:34:53.830]  Some of my dearest friends in the hacker community, you know, going back decades now, are people who politically disagree with me on many things.
[01:34:53.950 --> 01:35:02.630]  But we know that the real power is in sharing what we do have in common and what we are mutually interested in and learning new things that maybe we wouldn't have known about otherwise.
[01:35:02.950 --> 01:35:10.390]  One thing I'd really like to get your perspective on, Steve, is an issue that we've heard a lot about over the last few months, even years.
[01:35:11.050 --> 01:35:16.470]  The government authorities complaining that with encryption, their job becomes impossible.
[01:35:16.570 --> 01:35:17.910]  Has encryption affected your job?
[01:35:17.950 --> 01:35:19.490]  Oh, it's such a bunch of crap.
[01:35:20.050 --> 01:35:25.230]  Look, you need a whole show for this, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest version.
[01:35:25.610 --> 01:35:35.030]  First of all, and I'm going to preface this by saying again, I am a rah-rah, right-wing, pro-law enforcement guy.
[01:35:35.310 --> 01:35:50.330]  I think that law enforcement should have the right to get into a pedophile's cell phone or a pedophile's laptop or determine if there's information that will prevent the next terrorist bombing.
[01:35:50.530 --> 01:35:52.250]  I absolutely support that.
[01:35:52.390 --> 01:35:55.090]  But let me be honest.
[01:35:55.270 --> 01:36:05.970]  The FBI, in the most bumbling way possible, searched around for the most repulsive target to use to set legal precedent.
[01:36:06.210 --> 01:36:17.710]  Here you have two people who killed a bunch of innocent people, committed a terrorist attack, mass casualty terrorist attack in the homeland, killed themselves, and here's some digital devices.
[01:36:17.710 --> 01:36:24.870]  Here's some digital devices that maybe will show who their command and control was or other acts being planned.
[01:36:25.310 --> 01:36:27.270]  Who could object to that?
[01:36:27.670 --> 01:36:28.690]  Well, me.
[01:36:29.270 --> 01:36:29.830]  Me.
[01:36:30.110 --> 01:36:42.850]  Because what Apple was trying to, what FBI was trying to do was in the sleaziest, most dishonest way possible, not get a key to that phone, not get into that phone.
[01:36:42.930 --> 01:36:46.090]  They didn't go to Apple, unlock this particular phone for us.
[01:36:46.330 --> 01:37:00.190]  They tried to get an order for Apple to create a piece of software, a patch, a government OS, a GOV OS that would allow opening every phone, every iPhone.
[01:37:00.490 --> 01:37:14.470]  Now, by the way, they really shot themselves in the foot because Apple, in their really persnickety way, is now developing an updated OS with a secure enclave that Apple won't be able to do that in the future.
[01:37:14.650 --> 01:37:23.570]  So the FBI has basically screwed the world and forced Apple and other companies to create operating systems that even they themselves can't get into.
[01:37:23.790 --> 01:37:32.150]  But let me just tell you a couple of things as a professional investigator who works all over the world and trips over these situations all the time.
[01:37:32.150 --> 01:37:35.790]  First of all, the big terrorist attacks, nobody was using encryption.
[01:37:36.150 --> 01:37:39.210]  They would go into a store and they would buy 20 burner phones.
[01:37:39.210 --> 01:37:41.650]  And each guy would have three phones on them.
[01:37:41.790 --> 01:37:42.770]  They'd have a conversation.
[01:37:42.970 --> 01:37:44.330]  They'd each throw away that phone.
[01:37:44.510 --> 01:37:46.550]  Next time, they'd move to phone number two.
[01:37:47.190 --> 01:37:49.070]  Next time, they'd move to phone number three.
[01:37:49.350 --> 01:37:49.950]  No encryption.
[01:37:50.910 --> 01:37:52.730]  $20 7-11 phones.
[01:37:52.870 --> 01:37:53.390]  And you know what?
[01:37:53.490 --> 01:37:54.550]  That's almost unbreakable.
[01:37:54.790 --> 01:37:58.170]  These are the digital equivalent of one-time pads, if you know what they are.
[01:37:58.870 --> 01:38:08.050]  So first of all, in Belgium, in Paris, the big attacks, 7-7 in London, zero encryption.
[01:38:08.330 --> 01:38:09.690]  Absolutely zero encryption.
[01:38:10.290 --> 01:38:26.370]  Second of all, the problem with the San Bernardino cell phone arose because some idiot at the instructions at the FBI bricked that phone and created a situation where they couldn't get into the iCloud backup.
[01:38:27.230 --> 01:38:29.690]  So they had to go to DEFCON 1.
[01:38:31.610 --> 01:38:38.670]  You know, there's just so much I could say about this, but in a nutshell, terrorists are not effectively using encryption.
[01:38:38.810 --> 01:38:42.350]  They are bumbling criminals like everybody else is a bumbling criminal.
[01:38:42.670 --> 01:38:49.510]  I've often noticed that, but... And on top of that, on top of that, it was enormous overreach.
[01:38:49.670 --> 01:38:58.430]  If you are a criminal and you have evidence in your house, I should be able to get a warrant that allows me to get the key to your house.
[01:38:58.830 --> 01:39:02.290]  That warrant should not give me a master key to everybody's house.
[01:39:02.690 --> 01:39:09.970]  Every innocent person, every person who wants privacy, every person who wants to be left alone from the government.
[01:39:10.170 --> 01:39:14.310]  And let me put a disclaimer out there before I finish on this topic.
[01:39:14.990 --> 01:39:19.530]  I don't want people to think that because I've had a little kerfluffle with the FBI.
[01:39:20.350 --> 01:39:21.690]  I'm anti-FBI.
[01:39:21.930 --> 01:39:26.770]  On the contrary, that whole incident has made me even more pro-law enforcement.
[01:39:26.770 --> 01:39:27.670]  Because what happened?
[01:39:28.070 --> 01:39:30.330]  A couple of FBI agents overreached.
[01:39:30.610 --> 01:39:37.890]  People who were at the 2006 Hope saw a bunch of FBI agents storm in in raid jackets and take me out of there.
[01:39:38.070 --> 01:39:39.590]  I was locked up for the weekend.
[01:39:39.590 --> 01:39:40.290]  No big deal.
[01:39:40.390 --> 01:39:41.810]  I got 40 hours asleep.
[01:39:42.070 --> 01:39:42.970]  Came out.
[01:39:43.110 --> 01:39:44.010]  And what happened?
[01:39:44.230 --> 01:39:47.750]  The federal magistrate tore them to shreds.
[01:39:47.950 --> 01:39:53.970]  The two prosecutors who authorized it, they moved to the private sector almost immediately.
[01:39:54.450 --> 01:39:56.970]  Of the five agents, four of them are gone.
[01:39:56.970 --> 01:39:59.570]  And the fifth one, he's on the scuba team.
[01:39:59.670 --> 01:40:02.230]  Or as my lawyer says, he swims with the fishes.
[01:40:03.730 --> 01:40:03.930]  Wow.
[01:40:03.930 --> 01:40:07.590]  You know, the government did not prevail.
[01:40:07.930 --> 01:40:08.910]  They got squashed.
[01:40:09.350 --> 01:40:13.170]  Individual rights, rights of a defense investigator survived.
[01:40:13.630 --> 01:40:15.730]  I'm very proud of our justice system.
[01:40:15.770 --> 01:40:26.910]  But I have to tell you, I am an object lesson that the FBI has extraordinary powers, and they use them often just because they feel like it.
[01:40:27.130 --> 01:40:31.350]  And people who behave like that should not have access to everybody's cell phone.
[01:40:32.190 --> 01:40:41.910]  Well, just to stick with the encryption issue for a moment, it's a government's contention that, okay, maybe they're not using encryption now, but they will someday.
[01:40:41.910 --> 01:40:45.850]  And what do we do when everything is encrypted and we can't unlock it at all?
[01:40:45.890 --> 01:40:46.890]  What's your answer to that?
[01:40:47.090 --> 01:40:47.470]  All right.
[01:40:47.770 --> 01:41:00.890]  I've spent time over at the NSA, and I'm researching a book on the guy who, by the way, was a Snowden in his own right, and is responsible for the forming of the NSA, essentially, indirectly.
[01:41:03.190 --> 01:41:12.710]  I've got to tell you, I find it pretty difficult to believe that it's not like the old Mad Magazine spy versus spy.
[01:41:12.970 --> 01:41:15.410]  I find it very hard to believe that the U.S.
[01:41:15.550 --> 01:41:24.170]  government is not one step ahead of encryption and other personal privacy methodologies.
[01:41:24.390 --> 01:41:25.730]  Now, I'll tell you something else.
[01:41:25.730 --> 01:41:27.410]  You can encrypt everything you want.
[01:41:27.670 --> 01:41:32.530]  It's not going to remove metadata, which for investigators is almost more important.
[01:41:32.730 --> 01:41:44.930]  If you're a target of investigation, if I know who you're talking to and for how long and where your phone was and what you were doing and how you were doing it and with who, I don't really care what you guys were talking about.
[01:41:45.170 --> 01:41:47.610]  I'll go grab person B and person C.
[01:41:47.610 --> 01:41:49.030]  Trust me, they'll tell me.
[01:41:50.230 --> 01:41:53.350]  I don't really care if I overheard the conversation.
[01:41:53.630 --> 01:42:01.910]  And by the way, encryption of cell phones only interferes with monitoring in the present.
[01:42:02.990 --> 01:42:10.470]  99% of the time, by the time one of these homicide bombers blows themselves up, it's too late.
[01:42:10.470 --> 01:42:13.450]  You find out who the hell this guy was after the fact.
[01:42:13.650 --> 01:42:15.690]  There's no conversations for you to listen to.
[01:42:16.710 --> 01:42:19.090]  You can still go into their iCloud backup.
[01:42:19.390 --> 01:42:22.550]  And by the way, I don't know why iCloud is not a bigger part of this argument.
[01:42:22.990 --> 01:42:25.090]  You know, people are complaining about the FBI.
[01:42:25.170 --> 01:42:26.790]  The FBI has access to my phone.
[01:42:26.970 --> 01:42:28.510]  The FBI can get into my phone.
[01:42:28.950 --> 01:42:38.910]  Meanwhile, willy nilly, you're giving every detail of your life and your contacts and your activities and everything that that little snitch cell phone knows that you're doing.
[01:42:38.910 --> 01:42:44.350]  You're giving it to the knuckleheads at Apple so they can sell you t-shirts with pictures of cats on them.
[01:42:44.430 --> 01:42:45.090]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:42:45.390 --> 01:42:48.090]  People seem to willingly give away their privacy these days.
[01:42:49.170 --> 01:42:54.130]  This is what I tell all the feds and all the PIs that I train.
[01:42:54.630 --> 01:42:59.730]  Self-contributed information is the best information and it's most of the information.
[01:42:59.950 --> 01:43:09.410]  If you handed me a lamp and I rubbed it and a genie popped out and that genie said, Steve, you have one wish, but here's your choice.
[01:43:09.590 --> 01:43:14.430]  You can have all the information that the government has on everybody.
[01:43:14.750 --> 01:43:17.270]  NSA, FBI, CIA, NYPD.
[01:43:17.670 --> 01:43:21.150]  NYPD is a real competitor for CIA at this point.
[01:43:21.770 --> 01:43:26.230]  Everything that governmental agencies and law enforcement agencies have on everybody.
[01:43:26.530 --> 01:43:29.370]  Or you can have everything that private industry has.
[01:43:29.610 --> 01:43:39.710]  The credit bureaus, Facebook, Google, Apple, the marketing companies that nobody even talks about, Axiom, InfoUSA, who have a window into your soul.
[01:43:39.810 --> 01:43:42.330]  They know everything you do and everything you care about.
[01:43:42.610 --> 01:43:48.630]  If I have a choice between private industry or governmental and law enforcement, private industry, no question.
[01:43:49.170 --> 01:44:00.730]  Unless you're an Al-Qaeda member or a member of the Gambino crime family and the government is really watching you, private industry has exponentially more info about everybody.
[01:44:01.250 --> 01:44:05.050]  A lot of our listeners and readers use Gmail.
[01:44:05.450 --> 01:44:06.610]  What would you say to them?
[01:44:06.750 --> 01:44:07.730]  Is Gmail safe?
[01:44:08.250 --> 01:44:14.670]  Well, you know, there's a reason why Google says, don't delete your messages, archive them.
[01:44:15.130 --> 01:44:26.070]  It's because, you know, just the keywords that can be pulled out of your email are an indicator of who you are and what you care about.
[01:44:26.270 --> 01:44:29.230]  I will give your listeners a tricky experiment.
[01:44:29.850 --> 01:44:39.870]  Two of you should get together, two Gmail users should get together and start communicating, having a fake conversation about grandma who's come down with cancer.
[01:44:40.570 --> 01:44:56.990]  Have that conversation for about a week and you will see that in your, in the ads that they serve you, when you access Gmail through a browser, you're going to start seeing cancer books and cancer solutions and hospitals and things like that.
[01:44:57.290 --> 01:45:09.030]  You know, when you are using somebody else's computer system and you are agreeing to their terms of service, you're giving them access to the most intimate facets of your life.
[01:45:09.270 --> 01:45:17.910]  You know, your email communication over a period of a year will tell me everything there is to know about you.
[01:45:18.110 --> 01:45:18.650]  Everything.
[01:45:18.890 --> 01:45:25.130]  What's important to you, who are your closest friends, who are your family members, problems in your life?
[01:45:25.490 --> 01:45:30.370]  You know, what you're interested in, and you're giving Gmail access to that.
[01:45:30.950 --> 01:45:39.070]  Yeah, there's an old chestnut that uh about like, free services like Gmail, that uh, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer you're the product being sold.
[01:45:39.370 --> 01:45:39.950]  That's right to the customers.
[01:45:40.210 --> 01:45:40.750]  That's right.
[01:45:40.890 --> 01:45:48.430]  And, uh, you even mentioned earlier, like, you're having fun with an app, you know, it's giving up a certain amount of you, uh, your data, but you're having fun with the thing, so it's worth it.
[01:45:48.550 --> 01:45:56.410]  And it seems like with everything we do now when we pick up one of these devices, that That's basically at the crossroads of every interaction we have with so many aspects of modern life.
[01:45:56.710 --> 01:45:58.450]  We're making a constant stream of decisions.
[01:45:58.450 --> 01:45:59.970]  Like, how much of me is this worth?
[01:46:00.090 --> 01:46:01.150]  How much of me is that worth?
[01:46:01.570 --> 01:46:04.930]  What's worth giving up so I can have this toy or this tool or this whatever?
[01:46:05.150 --> 01:46:06.370]  But sometimes it's ridiculous.
[01:46:06.670 --> 01:46:08.190]  Are you familiar with the Flashlight app?
[01:46:08.450 --> 01:46:09.350]  The Flashlight app, yeah.
[01:46:09.390 --> 01:46:10.550]  I used that the other day.
[01:46:11.430 --> 01:46:11.830]  Okay.
[01:46:12.090 --> 01:46:14.570]  Have you looked at what the Flashlight app...
[01:46:14.570 --> 01:46:15.890]  It needs access to my contacts.
[01:46:16.210 --> 01:46:17.590]  It needs access to my GPS.
[01:46:17.590 --> 01:46:18.590]  It seems reasonable.
[01:46:18.590 --> 01:46:19.130]  Yeah.
[01:46:19.310 --> 01:46:23.950]  Well, all the Flashlight app does is it makes your screen glow.
[01:46:24.790 --> 01:46:28.090]  In return, you give up access to your address book.
[01:46:28.110 --> 01:46:30.170]  You give up access to your location.
[01:46:30.330 --> 01:46:33.630]  You give up access to your camera and your microphone.
[01:46:33.970 --> 01:46:34.530]  Why?
[01:46:35.270 --> 01:46:36.390]  It's outrageous.
[01:46:36.830 --> 01:46:43.090]  45% of all apps, that's the conservative estimate, grab personal and private data.
[01:46:43.530 --> 01:46:44.290]  It's true.
[01:46:44.470 --> 01:46:47.110]  When you're getting something for free, you are the product.
[01:46:47.270 --> 01:46:48.250]  You're what's being sold.
[01:46:48.590 --> 01:46:53.990]  And, you know, a lot of people who work for these companies say, I can't understand why people complain about things that are free.
[01:46:54.310 --> 01:46:57.170]  And I think you've given a very good explanation as to why.
[01:46:57.290 --> 01:46:58.230]  Because they don't know.
[01:46:58.610 --> 01:47:00.210]  Nobody reads terms of service.
[01:47:00.570 --> 01:47:01.570]  Look, I'll give you...
[01:47:01.570 --> 01:47:06.110]  I'll tell you one thing and then I'll yield the floor.
[01:47:06.570 --> 01:47:11.790]  There's a famous experiment that was done at a college in England.
[01:47:11.790 --> 01:47:18.110]  And a guy set up a booth on the quad and he said, I will give you a candy bar for your password.
[01:47:18.310 --> 01:47:19.150]  You remember this?
[01:47:19.550 --> 01:47:22.110]  I will give you a candy bar for your password.
[01:47:22.530 --> 01:47:27.130]  And something like 40% of the people gave up their email password for a candy bar.
[01:47:27.130 --> 01:47:28.470]  But they probably changed it right afterwards.
[01:47:28.650 --> 01:47:29.150]  Who knows?
[01:47:30.170 --> 01:47:30.470]  Wow.
[01:47:30.510 --> 01:47:32.010]  There was somebody who did something similar.
[01:47:32.510 --> 01:47:36.910]  I think it was in Brooklyn where they had cookies, like, as in the food.
[01:47:37.090 --> 01:47:40.670]  And they were shaped like the icon of Facebook or Twitter or what have you.
[01:47:41.130 --> 01:47:48.070]  And in order to get a free cookie, you had to give up not necessarily your password, but some people were asked for their birth date.
[01:47:48.170 --> 01:47:49.750]  Some people were asked for their mother's maiden name.
[01:47:49.970 --> 01:47:50.730]  And, you know, social.
[01:47:50.890 --> 01:47:52.130]  And the same sort of idea.
[01:47:52.130 --> 01:47:56.010]  I just wanted to remember or remind everybody that we're fundraising tonight.
[01:47:56.130 --> 01:47:58.970]  The pledge line is 516-620-3602.
[01:47:59.470 --> 01:48:02.350]  We're almost out of time, so please give a call to the station.
[01:48:02.450 --> 01:48:15.570]  If you've benefited from this conversation in any way, if you find yourself riveted to the radio, if you're sitting in your car by the garage and you don't want to go inside because you don't want to miss a second of it, consider giving a call to that phone number because this radio station makes these conversations possible.
[01:48:15.770 --> 01:48:19.070]  516-620-3602.
[01:48:19.150 --> 01:48:19.830]  Please call.
[01:48:19.970 --> 01:48:20.610]  You know what?
[01:48:20.610 --> 01:48:21.670]  I've been having so much fun.
[01:48:21.670 --> 01:48:22.910]  I forgot why I came on the show.
[01:48:23.150 --> 01:48:24.190]  Yes, we have to talk about this.
[01:48:24.190 --> 01:48:25.370]  Which was to talk about the privacy victim.
[01:48:25.510 --> 01:48:25.730]  Yes.
[01:48:25.770 --> 01:48:27.270]  I came on the show to do two things.
[01:48:27.410 --> 01:48:29.870]  Number one, to help you with your fundraising, which we'll talk about in a second.
[01:48:30.030 --> 01:48:33.910]  But the other, you know, turn up your radio, folks.
[01:48:35.510 --> 01:48:37.510]  Stop microwaving soup or whatever you're doing.
[01:48:37.710 --> 01:48:39.730]  Come over to the radio and please listen to this.
[01:48:40.050 --> 01:48:42.830]  And if you're listening to the podcast, that may not be too late.
[01:48:43.870 --> 01:48:48.090]  My telephone number is 212-969-0286.
[01:48:48.550 --> 01:48:51.130]  That's 212-969-0286.
[01:48:51.130 --> 01:48:53.390]  Or if you're listening now, call into the show.
[01:48:53.470 --> 01:48:54.170]  What's that number again?
[01:48:55.530 --> 01:49:00.210]  Right now, to call the 718-780-8888, 4-8s.
[01:49:00.330 --> 01:49:00.530]  Okay.
[01:49:00.690 --> 01:49:01.970]  That's to call the on-air.
[01:49:02.090 --> 01:49:03.370]  You want to talk to people on-air.
[01:49:03.550 --> 01:49:05.850]  I want a privacy victim.
[01:49:06.150 --> 01:49:07.430]  I want somebody...
[01:49:07.430 --> 01:49:08.250]  Here's the criteria.
[01:49:08.530 --> 01:49:11.490]  I want somebody who's old enough and active enough.
[01:49:11.630 --> 01:49:15.050]  Not somebody who's 14 and has been hanging out in the basement their whole life.
[01:49:15.050 --> 01:49:19.510]  But I want somebody who's had a life and has had a reasonably interesting life.
[01:49:19.710 --> 01:49:25.310]  Ideally, somebody with a few things to hide who will let me use them as a privacy victim.
[01:49:25.490 --> 01:49:27.670]  Who will let me investigate them.
[01:49:27.810 --> 01:49:29.570]  Who will cooperate with my investigation.
[01:49:29.990 --> 01:49:41.250]  And who will let me put up on the screen at the next hope all of the stuff that's available about them through open source and through moderately proprietary stuff.
[01:49:41.250 --> 01:49:42.590]  Not governmental databases.
[01:49:42.830 --> 01:49:45.370]  The point is to show what's out there on everybody.
[01:49:45.610 --> 01:49:48.610]  And then on top of that, we will look at their Facebook.
[01:49:48.810 --> 01:49:50.170]  We will look at their Google activity.
[01:49:50.250 --> 01:49:57.290]  And we will show how their general consciousness is now being shaped by these large companies.
[01:49:57.470 --> 01:49:59.070]  I need a privacy victim.
[01:49:59.410 --> 01:50:00.010]  Trust me.
[01:50:00.170 --> 01:50:01.450]  You will have a lot of fun.
[01:50:01.830 --> 01:50:02.630]  I'll be gentle.
[01:50:02.950 --> 01:50:03.950]  No rubber glove.
[01:50:04.470 --> 01:50:06.710]  You know, this is not a proctology exam.
[01:50:07.530 --> 01:50:08.530]  Well, maybe it is.
[01:50:08.630 --> 01:50:09.890]  Maybe it's a digital proctology.
[01:50:10.330 --> 01:50:10.930]  Go ahead.
[01:50:10.930 --> 01:50:21.650]  Yeah, you very well may be getting people to behave in different ways since this is basically the next level with all of this information and a correlation going on.
[01:50:22.430 --> 01:50:26.530]  Maybe we'll get someone to say something in particular or do something.
[01:50:26.570 --> 01:50:30.230]  Steve, you want people to call in now, but they're not going to give out their information now, right?
[01:50:30.230 --> 01:50:34.650]  No, but if anybody has a question, if anybody wants a clarification, call in now.
[01:50:34.710 --> 01:50:44.450]  If anybody has a question about anything that we've discussed or any investigative topic, call in now or feel free to call me after the show, not tonight because I'm going home and going to sleep.
[01:50:44.450 --> 01:50:53.090]  But tomorrow, 212-969-0286 or pull up my company webpage and send something to the office.
[01:50:53.090 --> 01:50:54.530]  My company is Polorium.
[01:50:54.750 --> 01:50:57.110]  P as in Peter, A-double-L-O-R-I-U-M.
[01:50:57.730 --> 01:51:02.530]  And the phone number to call now, if you want to ask Steve a question, 718-780-8888.
[01:51:03.450 --> 01:51:10.630]  More importantly, though, if you want to pledge to the station and keep us on the air, 516-620-3602.
[01:51:10.710 --> 01:51:13.410]  You know, I think this conversation is worth a thousand bucks.
[01:51:13.490 --> 01:51:14.010]  What do you think?
[01:51:14.530 --> 01:51:17.290]  If you have it, please call that number and donate it.
[01:51:17.590 --> 01:51:20.290]  And you're assured of more conversations like that in the future.
[01:51:20.470 --> 01:51:20.930]  Okay, I'll say this.
[01:51:20.930 --> 01:51:26.870]  I'm not allowed to offer any benefit or I have to be very careful what I say here.
[01:51:27.310 --> 01:51:32.070]  Everybody's suddenly tensing up and getting nervous, wondering what I'm going to say.
[01:51:32.190 --> 01:51:33.290]  The armed guards are a bit much.
[01:51:33.290 --> 01:51:41.150]  I see Emmanuel's got his finger on the slider to suddenly silence me if I say something wrong, one of the seven bad words or whatever.
[01:51:41.430 --> 01:51:54.270]  But let me say that if you give a large donation and help support this show, it is entirely possible that I will be inclined to do something beneficial for you if you call me at a later date.
[01:51:54.490 --> 01:51:55.130]  There you go.
[01:51:55.630 --> 01:51:56.510]  Did I say that in a careful way?
[01:51:56.510 --> 01:51:57.730]  No, yeah, I think that was perfect.
[01:51:58.090 --> 01:51:58.290]  That was a sneaky one.
[01:51:58.350 --> 01:51:58.910]  That was well done.
[01:51:59.130 --> 01:51:59.270]  That was really good.
[01:51:59.410 --> 01:52:01.270]  Listen, I'm from Brooklyn and I'm an investigator.
[01:52:01.330 --> 01:52:02.250]  I'm good at sneaking.
[01:52:02.690 --> 01:52:03.670]  Let's take a phone call.
[01:52:03.750 --> 01:52:04.070]  Good evening.
[01:52:04.210 --> 01:52:05.010]  You're on Off the Hook.
[01:52:05.490 --> 01:52:06.270]  Oh, excellent.
[01:52:06.570 --> 01:52:06.730]  I'm Brady.
[01:52:06.870 --> 01:52:08.090]  This device is filtered.
[01:52:08.430 --> 01:52:11.990]  I wanted to start off by saying thanks for the show so far.
[01:52:12.590 --> 01:52:21.550]  I've been trying to get information through FOIA requests, but typically that seems like a dead end or somebody puts some ancillary subcharge on it, kind of like dealing with a bank.
[01:52:23.390 --> 01:52:23.830]  Okay.
[01:52:24.550 --> 01:52:26.590]  I will tell you, don't lose hope.
[01:52:26.730 --> 01:52:30.490]  I have had enormous success with FOIA requests that I filed.
[01:52:30.750 --> 01:52:32.550]  You may have to go to a professional.
[01:52:32.830 --> 01:52:37.710]  There are crowdsourced FOIA requesters like, what is it, MuckRock?
[01:52:38.530 --> 01:52:39.790]  MuckRock is a good example.
[01:52:39.970 --> 01:52:41.450]  There are people on the internet.
[01:52:41.450 --> 01:52:45.910]  You can email them or fill out a form with your FOIA request.
[01:52:46.070 --> 01:52:53.630]  If they feel that it is genuinely something in the private interest, they will for free beat up on the governmental agency for you.
[01:52:53.690 --> 01:52:54.990]  We have these people show up at HOPE, too.
[01:52:55.210 --> 01:52:56.010]  So you can do it there.
[01:52:56.010 --> 01:53:04.250]  Well, and this is a good reason for you to come to HOPE, support HOPE, meet these people, nudge them through the whole conference until they agree to take your FOIA request.
[01:53:04.710 --> 01:53:05.250]  No, no, no.
[01:53:05.330 --> 01:53:08.830]  There are people that you can upload a description of your FOIA request.
[01:53:08.830 --> 01:53:13.510]  And if they feel that it's something that's genuinely in the public interest, they'll do it for you.
[01:53:13.610 --> 01:53:14.750]  They'll process it professionally.
[01:53:14.930 --> 01:53:16.770]  They'll harass the governmental agency.
[01:53:16.970 --> 01:53:23.450]  The only thing is they will share your information with the world, which if you're listening to this show, you probably don't mind.
[01:53:23.630 --> 01:53:24.910]  Okay, we have another caller joining us.
[01:53:24.970 --> 01:53:25.250]  Good evening.
[01:53:25.350 --> 01:53:25.890]  You're on Off the Hook.
[01:53:26.890 --> 01:53:27.690]  Hello, how are you doing?
[01:53:27.750 --> 01:53:28.070]  Can you hear me?
[01:53:28.190 --> 01:53:28.730]  Yes, go ahead.
[01:53:29.130 --> 01:53:32.150]  Okay, this is an interviewer that you have on.
[01:53:32.490 --> 01:53:34.410]  Can you get slowly his phone number again, 212?
[01:53:35.470 --> 01:53:36.590]  You know, I apologize.
[01:53:36.590 --> 01:53:38.050]  I speak like a Brooklyn guy.
[01:53:38.390 --> 01:53:39.010]  I speak too fast.
[01:53:39.330 --> 01:53:41.350]  Everyone on a radio station does the same thing.
[01:53:41.470 --> 01:53:42.130]  Yeah, we all do that.
[01:53:42.290 --> 01:53:48.750]  It's 212-969-0286.
[01:53:48.930 --> 01:53:54.510]  Again, that's 212-969-0286.
[01:53:55.110 --> 01:53:57.290]  All right, and that should suffice.
[01:53:57.470 --> 01:53:58.370]  Did you have any other question?
[01:53:58.830 --> 01:53:59.310]  My guess.
[01:53:59.310 --> 01:54:00.630]  My question is this.
[01:54:00.810 --> 01:54:10.270]  There's been a great deal of reports from authenticative sources that the FBI has been operating the Jade Helm experience.
[01:54:10.610 --> 01:54:12.550]  Do you know anything about the Jade Helm experience?
[01:54:12.550 --> 01:54:23.710]  I have a home and an office in Texas where Jade Helm took place, and these are the same people who told you that a black helicopter is following you home.
[01:54:23.710 --> 01:54:24.610]  It's a bunch of crap.
[01:54:24.770 --> 01:54:25.950]  Don't worry about Jade Helm.
[01:54:25.950 --> 01:54:30.730]  So nobody is setting up civilian concentration camps for dissenters.
[01:54:31.070 --> 01:54:34.250]  Now, we'll see what Trump does.
[01:54:34.430 --> 01:54:35.590]  With him, it may be possible.
[01:54:35.770 --> 01:54:36.590]  Have you watched Colony?
[01:54:36.870 --> 01:54:38.990]  I mean, this stuff's really kind of believable.
[01:54:39.690 --> 01:54:40.310]  All right, thanks.
[01:54:40.390 --> 01:54:40.950]  Thanks for that call.
[01:54:41.070 --> 01:54:42.190]  We're going to try and take one more.
[01:54:42.370 --> 01:54:42.750]  Good evening.
[01:54:42.950 --> 01:54:43.810]  You are on off the hook.
[01:54:43.910 --> 01:54:44.150]  Go ahead.
[01:54:45.110 --> 01:54:45.410]  Good night.
[01:54:45.470 --> 01:54:45.890]  How are you doing?
[01:54:45.890 --> 01:54:46.630]  I have a question.
[01:54:46.810 --> 01:54:48.850]  I was wondering, the fact that they...
[01:54:49.710 --> 01:54:50.150]  Go ahead.
[01:54:50.230 --> 01:54:51.650]  I wanted to say your guest tonight.
[01:54:51.850 --> 01:54:55.250]  I mean, tonight's show is a pleasure, and this is an excellent show.
[01:54:55.250 --> 01:54:55.850]  Thank you.
[01:54:56.690 --> 01:55:00.310]  I called last week, and I said I was sending out 40 because I knew the pledge was coming up.
[01:55:00.570 --> 01:55:03.510]  I'm sending another one, too, because, I mean, I really need this.
[01:55:03.690 --> 01:55:04.590]  I really, really need this.
[01:55:04.690 --> 01:55:05.290]  Thank you so much.
[01:55:05.470 --> 01:55:06.410]  I don't even want anything for it.
[01:55:06.470 --> 01:55:10.190]  I just put a money order in the envelope and send it straight over to WBAI.
[01:55:10.230 --> 01:55:11.350]  And make sure you mention off the hook.
[01:55:11.450 --> 01:55:12.150]  That way we get credit.
[01:55:12.370 --> 01:55:13.870]  Papa needs a new keyboard, baby.
[01:55:15.070 --> 01:55:15.490]  Well, thanks.
[01:55:15.610 --> 01:55:15.910]  I got a question.
[01:55:15.910 --> 01:55:16.270]  Thanks so much.
[01:55:16.370 --> 01:55:16.610]  Go ahead.
[01:55:16.750 --> 01:55:17.330]  What's your question?
[01:55:25.250 --> 01:55:35.910]  Most places nowadays, if you try to apply for a job, even, it's very rare that you can actually even go like you used to back in the day and actually fill out a paper application, you know, hand it into somebody.
[01:55:36.070 --> 01:55:40.850]  So most places now want an application online before they even see you face-to-face.
[01:55:40.990 --> 01:55:41.490]  That's right.
[01:55:41.490 --> 01:55:47.390]  All that information, is that protected in any way from the access that you're talking about?
[01:55:47.530 --> 01:55:47.710]  Yeah.
[01:55:47.850 --> 01:55:49.350]  Let me tell you, there are federal laws.
[01:55:49.490 --> 01:55:52.670]  This is actually one good thing that the feds does do.
[01:55:52.770 --> 01:55:53.030]  Okay.
[01:55:53.430 --> 01:55:58.970]  There's the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, and there's the Federal Fair Employment Act.
[01:55:59.430 --> 01:56:12.450]  Not only is your information protected, but you are entitled, if you're denied a job, you are entitled to a copy of the report that caused your job to be denied, and you are legally allowed to challenge it.
[01:56:13.070 --> 01:56:13.210]  Okay.
[01:56:13.470 --> 01:56:14.670]  Thanks to everybody who called in.
[01:56:14.750 --> 01:56:18.750]  And again, if you want to write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
[01:56:19.350 --> 01:56:22.230]  Steve, we hope we find a victim for you because we have a good track record.
[01:56:22.230 --> 01:56:24.570]  I need a victim, and I hope everybody comes to Hope.
[01:56:24.790 --> 01:56:33.110]  And if you are a law enforcement officer or an investigator, we are going to have an entire investigative track, either at the facility or next door in the New Yorker.
[01:56:33.250 --> 01:56:35.010]  We're going to have a lot of fun this year.
[01:56:35.210 --> 01:56:35.530]  All right.
[01:56:35.670 --> 01:56:37.830]  Steve Rambam, Private Eye, thanks so much for joining us.
[01:56:38.090 --> 01:56:39.870]  Look forward to your talk at the 11th Hope.
[01:56:39.870 --> 01:56:42.110]  More info on Hope at Hope.net.
[01:56:42.890 --> 01:56:45.370]  And we will see you, I think, in two weeks.
[01:56:45.970 --> 01:56:48.170]  There are 2600 meetings this week, Rob?
[01:56:48.350 --> 01:56:48.790]  Yes, indeed.
[01:56:48.930 --> 01:56:50.910]  Friday, this Friday evening, all over the world.
[01:56:51.190 --> 01:56:54.330]  2600.com slash meetings to find one near you or start one near you.
[01:56:54.470 --> 01:56:54.890]  All right.
[01:56:55.470 --> 01:56:57.370]  For Off the Hooks, Emmanuel, have a good night.
[01:56:57.750 --> 01:56:58.190]  See you soon.
[01:56:58.290 --> 01:56:58.430]  Good night.
[01:56:58.430 --> 01:56:59.410]  Laboratory, Dexter.
[01:57:00.010 --> 01:57:00.570]  Finally.
[01:57:00.950 --> 01:57:07.190]  I am rid of my sister forever, and I can enjoy conducting my experiments in peace.
[01:57:07.990 --> 01:57:09.230]  Yes, Dexter.
[01:57:09.630 --> 01:57:12.470]  All systems are operating at optimum efficiency.
[01:57:24.390 --> 01:57:27.570]  It is very lonely here without you.
[01:57:28.590 --> 01:57:29.450]  Real good.
[01:57:29.450 --> 01:57:30.930]  Real good.
[01:57:36.390 --> 01:57:38.830]  Real good.
[01:57:51.610 --> 01:57:54.410]  Real good.
[01:57:54.410 --> 01:57:55.250]  I do not have time.
[01:57:55.570 --> 01:57:56.990]  Cuz you know...
[01:57:58.270 --> 01:58:00.030]  Sometimes I amaze you.
[01:58:00.410 --> 01:58:01.710]  You have to.
[01:58:01.870 --> 01:58:02.630]  Understand?
[01:58:04.490 --> 01:58:06.410]  You must continue.
[01:58:07.790 --> 01:58:08.730]  What do you?
[01:58:09.050 --> 01:58:10.710]  What do you find it?
[01:58:12.310 --> 01:58:13.070]  Understand?
[01:58:13.870 --> 01:58:16.690]  My best friend can do...
[01:58:16.690 --> 01:58:16.970]  Understand?
[01:58:20.980 --> 01:58:26.220]  What do you find it?
[01:58:26.540 --> 01:58:26.740]  Hello?
[01:58:26.860 --> 01:58:27.320]  Say what?
[01:58:27.460 --> 01:58:27.620]  Hello?
[01:58:28.060 --> 01:58:30.340]  I can't even work!
[01:58:57.920 --> 01:58:59.360]  Cause you know...
[01:59:00.420 --> 01:59:01.920]  What am I...
[01:59:01.920 --> 01:59:02.640]  You're a monster!
[01:59:04.400 --> 01:59:05.880]  Stand down.
[01:59:06.220 --> 01:59:07.740]  He's so cool.
[01:59:08.140 --> 01:59:09.340]  He'll make you know.
[01:59:09.880 --> 01:59:10.760]  Leave a knife.
[01:59:11.320 --> 01:59:13.040]  What if I did?
[01:59:13.720 --> 01:59:14.900]  What colors?
[01:59:16.180 --> 01:59:17.680]  My best friend.
[01:59:18.500 --> 01:59:22.140]  What colors?
[01:59:31.270 --> 01:59:31.990]  What am I...
[01:59:32.570 --> 01:59:33.390]  You're a monster!