There will be a special guest performance by Grammy and Oscar-nominated Impact Repertory
Theater. There will be a light supper and additional performers and speakers,
including Momiya Abu-Jamal, who is sponsoring this event. For further details, call
212-330-8029. That's 212-330-8029.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York. The time is eight o'clock. Time once again
for Off The Hook.
I cut myself while shaving. Now I can't make a cut.
We couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum-diddly-bum!
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein
here with you, joined tonight by Alex. Good evening. And Kyle. Hi there.
Well, we've had a busy week, as I'm going to have a special guest on in a few minutes,
too. We're going to be talking about all kinds of interesting things involving the phone companies
and various other challenges. But we've been busy updating the list of concentration camps that we
had posted on concentrationcamps.us, you know, and internmentcamps.us, too, for those people
offended by the first term. We have so many. It's not a good thing by any means. So many people are
contributing to us via SecureDrop, via our webmaster account. And we are trying to decipher
the many, many different locations, ones run by private companies. It's really mind-boggling to
see all of this. But it's also heartening to see the interest and to realize that so many people
have taken a concern. We have some listener feedback to this as well, but we'll get to that
in a moment. Alex, I know you were interested in a court case that recently came down involving
Twitter. Want to tell us something about this? If you insist. Yeah, I do insist. Okay, well,
if you insist, then I'll do it. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, as many of our listeners know, there was a
fantastic ruling that came down from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the federal
appellate court that has jurisdiction over New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. And there was
an appeal from a U.S. District Court judge in the Southern District of New York about whether
Donald Trump, as President of the United States, can individually block people on Twitter from
viewing his real Donald Trump account, and specifically whether he can block people because
they say certain things that he doesn't like or he doesn't agree with. And the court found and
ruled that it was an unconstitutional violation, that the President was violating the Constitution,
and specifically the First Amendment, by blocking these individual plaintiffs from viewing his real
Donald Trump account. Is it viewing and responding, or one or the other? Do we know? Well,
the opinion really hinges on the interactivity of Twitter itself. And I really have to say,
it's kind of funny to see a judge describe in great legal detail what retweeting is,
and tweeting, and commenting, and, you know, it's kind of neat. But, you know,
you have to realize, too, that these are... It's stopped being funny, you know? It's just sad now.
It really is. But go on. Well, you have to think about this. You know, this is case law. It's on
the books. It's evolving the Constitution of the United States. And 100 years from now, people
will be looking at this particular decision and may not have any idea. I hope they have
no idea what Twitter is. I just say to those people, we're sorry. We tried to stop this,
but we're sorry. This is like an emoji linguist or something, where like we're navel-gazing and
deciding the terms for things that ought not to have to be defined in the first place. But yes,
what is the communication that's occurring on social media? Is it a letter? Yeah, let's get
to this Trump thing. What did they decide? Well, they decided that... Well, they had a couple
threshold issues that they had to determine. And one of them was somewhat tricky in a sense,
because you have the POTUS account, you know, which is the President of the United States,
you know, POTUS, right? And then real Donald Trump. The real Donald Trump account was created
in 2009 by Donald Trump, way before, hopefully, he ever had any aspirations of becoming president.
And he then used that private account that he created in an official capacity. So the court
had to determine, is this something that belongs to Donald Trump as an individual, or is it
governmental property? And what it all really came down to was, because Donald Trump was using his
Twitter account to make official announcements, you know, to interact with foreign leaders, to
announce policy changes, like banning transgender troops in the United States Armed Forces,
you know, all these kinds of official things that he's been doing on Twitter,
changed it from a piece of private property into something that now belongs to the government,
because he's been using it in such an official capacity. And in fact, you know, part of this
conclusion too, is that the National Archives had made a determination that the President's tweets
should be part of the National Archives. And in fact, real Donald Trump's tweets should be
part of the National Archives. So the judge stepped through this and sort of made a mockery
of the government's arguments that he was using this in a private capacity.
Well, I think also can't have it both ways. And this is a great example of that in the
sense that they're, you know, pushing the paradigm, you know, and talking about, oh,
this is, you know, a different kind of presidency, all of these kind of characterizations really
push them to using this mode of communication as an official means, but not when they don't,
you know, only when they consider it that way, when it doesn't serve them, and it isn't in their
favor, then all of a sudden, it's this private thing that, you know, it's kind of like an email
server or something, right?
Oh, exactly. And the, you know, Judge Parker, who wrote the decision, has this quote in there,
the president even described his use of the account as, quote, and then it's in all caps,
because, you know, this came from Donald Trump, modern day presidential.
So good. Well, again, people of the future, we're so sorry. But we just, we have to, we have to just
try and get through this. So what's the upshot of this, Alex?
Well, the upshot of this is quite interesting, I think, because, you know, once you establish that
a Twitter account is being used in an official governmental capacity, and then you have it
established that Twitter is a public forum, then you cannot discriminate on the basis of viewpoint
anymore. You know, this does not foreclose other challenges, you know, to other social media
platforms, mechanisms, etc. And so if, on the other hand, there was a governmental official
who blamed people and blocked people, but he only tweeted about, you know,
taking his kids to soccer practice, and, you know, not liking the local playground,
or something like that, if he wasn't doing anything official with it, then you can ban
whomever you like.
I'm curious if there is a possibility, say, for instance, the platform itself is not
where the president might be able to block individuals, because, of course, this ruling
would give you the sense that, okay, now he has to look at everything that is written into his
account as a comment or whatnot. But to that end, is there something in between that perhaps,
because now the floodgates are open, as a result of the ruling, that he would be using
something else to filter, such that maybe, you know, only the people he is comfortable with
are the ones that he sees? In other words, is there stuff that perhaps, okay, Twitter isn't
implementing this, but he's adding something to his viewing of the account, or his use of
the account, much in the way that, you know, sharing photos, there's a lot of other things
that interact with the Twitter API. Would there be a way for him to, for us to think that he's,
you know, got this wide open account that is a public forum that we can all interact with,
but in reality, he's not actually getting them, because there's other things that are
implemented. I'm very curious if that's going to be a strategy going forward.
It's an interesting point. And, you know, this is actually mentioned in the opinion,
and I think is quite telling, is that, you know, we have no right to force the government to listen
to our voices. We just, we don't have that right. We can speak and yell to our heart's content,
and they don't necessarily have to listen. So sure, the president could be filtering this out.
But what the court found most interesting about Twitter, and in particular, how interactive the
president's use of Twitter was, is that, you know, he'll make a statement, but it's the dialogue
that happens underneath the statement. It's the replies, and the comments, and the back and forth.
That creates a dialogue and an interactivity on a platform that made this into a public forum.
And because he enabled this interactivity, allowed it to persist, and then using this
in his governmental capacity, just decided to ban people because he didn't like what they were
saying. That was discrimination on the basis of viewpoint. I think I finally get it, because
anybody can look at Trump's tweets just by going to twitter.com slash real Donald Trump and reading.
But what you're saying is when he blocks, I've never been blocked. I don't even know what it's
like. I've never blocked anyone either. I've muted people, but I've never blocked anyone.
But apparently it's a big thing when someone gets blocked. So when these people who follow
him are blocked, they can't participate in that conversation. Something else I don't usually do
either. I usually just, you know, top post or whatever you call that. But these people, for
some reason, want to take part in that massive dialogue that takes place under every single
thing he ever says. And he's able to prevent them from doing that by blocking them. Is that
how it works? That's exactly right. In fact, let me read from the court. It said,
by blocking the individual plaintiffs and preventing them from viewing, retweeting,
replying to, and liking his tweets, the president excluded the individual plaintiffs from a public
forum, something the First Amendment prohibits. And, you know, I think this is really fascinating
because, you know, if a governmental official had a private account, you could block to your
heart's content. But if you are using it in official capacity and you have that interactive
component to what is happening on your account, and then you start banning people because you
don't like them or blocking people because you don't like their viewpoint, it's unconstitutional.
This brings back the heady days of Giuliani to mind when, I don't know if our listeners
remember or if you even remember, Emanuel. They remember.
Yes. But I'm talking specifically about the issues with the Brooklyn Museum of Art when
there was, I think it was the Saatchi exhibit, where there was a depiction of the Virgin Mary
with elephant dung on her. And Giuliani had decried this and said that he was going to
stop funding to the Brooklyn Museum because he didn't like this and it was offensive to Catholics.
And again, that was also viewpoint discrimination. So, you know, you just can't do that when you're
acting in a governmental capacity. You know, I think what I'm hearing,
what I'm hearing, the more important thing is that history and the way this is recorded will
not block these opinions from whether it's irrespective of whether he is actually viewing
the commentary in real time or protecting himself, as I was alluding to, the real cruxes that in the
historical record, as this goes down, those conversations will be recorded and have to be.
And, you know, speaking of history, I think, you know, it's a great segue to just read the
final paragraph of this decision because I think it really sums it all up and sums up the
strange time that we live in. Judge Parker writes, the irony in all of this is that we
write at a time in the history of this nation when the conduct of our government and its officials
is subject to wide open robust debate. This debate encompasses an extraordinarily broad
range of ideas and viewpoints and generates a level of passion and intensity, the likes of
which have rarely been seen. This debate, as uncomfortable and unpleasant as it frequently
may be, is nonetheless a good thing. In resolving this appeal, we remind the litigants and the
public that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response
to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less.
I agree with that. Certainly I agree with that. And does that mean that
everybody's unblocked now or what's happening now?
No. In fact, people that are blocked are already ruminating that, you know,
that the president's probably not going to follow this decision and he's not going to
unblock them. And then, you know, you could bring a you could try to hold the president
in contempt for not unblocking you. But remember, this is the Second Circuit.
But how about couldn't Twitter just disable his unblocking feature for that account?
They could do that.
They could.
They could fix this. Twitter, fix this. Fix all the things we keep complaining.
Well, they could. And then they could reactivate it once he is no longer in office and it becomes
private property once again.
Well, yeah, but I don't want to wait. I'm tired of waiting. We're too patient. We need
to do things now. You know, look what people in the other parts of the world do. They take
action. Look what, you know, in Hong Kong, that kind of thing. That's what we need to do.
Anyway, not enough time to go into all my wishes.
Let's look at a couple of pieces of email that we got from listeners at OTH at 2600.com.
On the July 3rd, off the hook last week, we talked about the Berks Family Residential
Center. This listener said, I'd like to share some additional information with you.
First, to Kyle's point, Berks is not a family name. It's the name of the county.
All right. Point taken. But I ask, is it possible that the county then is named after a person?
Yeah. So that could be a family name, right? Well, as it turns out, we did some research
right before the show and found out that, in fact, it actually is named after Berkshire
in England. So it's it's not it's not a family name. But then somebody raised the point of,
well, maybe Berkshire in England was named after a family. So we did more research.
That's why we were late. And according to a biography of King Alfred, the name comes from
a wood of box trees, which is a Celtic word that doesn't bear any resemblance to this.
I probably can't pronounce it, but the wood probably doesn't even exist anymore. So that's
that's how you got Berks County. Anyway, Berks Family Residential Center, one of the
facilities that we listed on the concentration camps at U.S. and internment camps at U.S. site
from 2011 to July 2017. The county has made nearly seven million dollars from operating
the detention center for ice. A duck, duck, go search will reveal. Yes, that's right. That's
what you do. A duck, duck, go search will reveal that it has been the subject of many articles,
both print and online and covered by television stations in Philadelphia. At the last hope,
I talked with Alex about this facility and his offer to assist the people detain their pro bono.
And after hope, I contacted the center to provide Alex's contact information and cell
phones to the people being held there. But because I'm not a member of the bar in Pennsylvania,
I was not allowed to enter the facility. None of the lawyers quoted in the aforementioned articles
returned my calls or emails offering to provide Alex's contact information.
Thank you for compiling the list, for highlighting this facility. Keep fighting the good fight.
And Alex, if you get a call from my wife later this month, it's because I've been detained by
Customs and Border Patrol trying to reenter the United States. So be prepared for that.
Yeah, I saw that correspondence. And I recall that specific conversation that we had, you know,
right, right outside of our booth on top of the escalators at hope this past summer. And, you
know, the listener brings up, I think, a really valid point here that, you know, there are so
many obstacles, so many hurdles to get through just to get your voice heard, even when you're
offering to represent these people for free. It's just hard to get the word into those facilities.
When we put that offer out, you know, it went like wildfire around social media. We even had
celebrities retweeting it, like Anna Chlumsky from Veep, if you remember. I know you're a big fan of
that show. Yeah. Who does she play? Amy, I think it is. Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And she's cool.
Yeah, no doubt. She gets things done. No doubt. Yeah, absolutely. And so it's very easy to get
the word out, you know, outside of these facilities, but getting past that barrier. I
mean, it's almost it's like this impermeable membrane to get our information into those
facilities. And then you have obstacles like being a member of the Bar of Pennsylvania. Well,
that's just kind of ridiculous, too, because, you know, these are federal matters. I'd love to know
if because I'm a member of the Bar of the Third Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Pennsylvania,
if I would be allowed into that facility without being a member of the State Bar of Pennsylvania.
We have to test these things. We have to find out the answer. Let's take a road trip. Yeah,
I'm down. Me too. Let's go. All right. Let's take another listener letter. Again,
oth at 2600.com. Write to us. We'd love to hear from you. This is from a listener named Mary.
As a listener and supporter, I'd like to express my admiration for your work on the concentration
camp directory. I'd also like to challenge a few points you made in your last episode.
We might have time just for one or two challenges, a lot of challenges. Coming from the perspective
of a person who is both deeply involved in social justice struggles and who works as a sysadmin.
And for years, I felt alternately inspired by the values of freedom of speech,
information and expression espoused by hacker culture and frustrated with the shape of the
discourse that surrounds those values, which is all to say, I'm not firing shots as a casual
critic. I've been thinking about these things for a while. I've been genuinely conflicted about
whether or not I belong in the community and dismayed by the fact that spaces like the
electronic freedom movement seem to go so far out of their way to keep their distance from social
justice movements. It's all words, all labels. I'm curious to hear from you, though. Why is it
so important to assert that publishing the list was a politically neutral act? Certainly the value
of the information was a driving force behind it. And I certainly believe that your intention for
how folks should use the information was neutral, but no action is taken in an abstract plane of
ideological purity. Actions influence the world around us and others often communicate political
values. You could have spent your time publishing a list of abortion clinics or gathering publicly
available information to doxy the left or right wing activist. Any of those things would have had
very different implications and would have communicated very different values in prioritizing
which set of information to gather and bring to the public's attention. You made a choice.
Why not call it a political choice and stand behind it? Well, it's interesting. I'm a bit
conflicted on this. I see the point. But when you make something a political statement, you kind of
justify those who disagree as just other politics, people who have differing political opinions.
And publishing a list of these sites, to me at least, is a human rights issue. And if you disagree
with that, I think there's something wrong with you. I don't think it's another political view.
I think you just don't have value for human life. I don't want to make that another political view.
You know, so that's why we say that when we publish information like this or we publish any
neutral information, it's not with a political agenda other than the fact that we exist as a
political agenda, but simply because we want the information to be out there, because people have
the right to know this. And in the case of the camps and the facilities, people need to know that.
I don't know. That's just my immediate feeling on that.
You know, and I think the flip side of this, too, is if we do make it an overtly political act,
it becomes very easy to paint us as, you know, pinko liberal lefties, right? When in reality,
you know, I don't really think that that's the case. I mean, we did certainly, I think most of
us in this room lean, you know, pretty far left, but we like to criticize the left as well. I mean,
when Clinton was in office and Janet Reno was the attorney general, she was constantly, you know,
subject to a barrage of criticism from us.
Oh, I'll criticize him today.
We criticize Obama.
You don't have to go back in time.
You know, so I think if you make it something that is very overtly political, it becomes very
easy for the other side to then just discredit you as another political act. And I think we want to
try to avoid that because, you know, as I mentioned last week, we're talking, as Emanuel
mentioned, about human rights issues, and in particular, the rights of children. And that's
as apolitical a thing as there should be in this world, the welfare of a child.
I think the real tone, like I think what we meant, I could see why it was confusing in the moment,
but I honestly think that it's not us necessarily that we were falling over ourselves to be,
you know, having a disclaimer in the conversation about being neutral ourselves. I think the point
was that the list itself was neutral. We, of course, you know, respect, I think, a diversity
of opinions and so on and so forth. But as he said, it's obvious. And I think it's we want to
get to that place of agreement so that there is a very large number, a consensus that is actually
speaking up against the executive that is actually implementing these actions.
So, we kind of feel like, you know, the list itself is just a list, and we didn't want to
describe what people had to do with it, but we felt the information was important enough because
of the topic. But in describing that, I think what came up is we were trying to encapsulate
all of that without the distinction. And the distinction really is that the information itself
and the fact that it's organized, that's a neutral thing. It could go in a trash can
or be wiped from a hard drive. You know, it's just data. But the reason for publicizing it, I think,
is out of a sense of duty to the humanitarian need and to really make the statement that this
should be consensus as a society. The last thing I want to do is exclude somebody and say,
well, you're a Republican, so therefore this is opposed to what you stand for. Because I
don't believe that's true. I believe there are plenty of people out there on all political
spectrums that see this and react with horror and want to know more. Now, if there aren't enough
from a particular political vantage, that's on them. That's them saying, I don't care about this,
and I am of this particular political persuasion. But I don't want to make that assumption. I don't
want to go in there saying, this is something that only people in this political camp will get
and others won't. I'd rather people have a chance to prove if they're woke or not.
Yeah. So, I mean, if you heard us saying we were being neutral in this, I think what
we really meant was this is as neutral as we're going to be about this because it can't stand
any longer. And again, individually, a different story. Get us started individually. We'll all
listen Tuesday nights to our other show and you'll hear us go off on our political views. But as far
as just presenting a list, it's a list. It's data and it needs to be out there. Okay. So, enough
about that. Thank you, Murray, for writing in. Sorry we couldn't get to the other points, but
we only have an hour and we have a lot to talk about. We have a special guest joining us now,
Bruce Kushnick, Managing Director of an organization known as the Irregulators. Welcome
to Off The Hook. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. Bruce, you gave a talk at the
HOPE Conference, Circle of Hope, last year. I did. And it's also up as a video. Yes. Yes. It's
on our YouTube channel, channel 2600. Now, you're involved in suing the FCC, I believe. And that's
something everybody here at the station, I think, can appreciate. You want to give us a basic outline
as to what that lawsuit was about? Sure. It's ongoing. And just if you want to donate some
money to help the cause, that'd be great. The Irregulators has been around for almost a decade
as different groups of people. What we found was so crazy and so ridiculous that it's going to
probably shock most people here. Let me start from the very beginning of what exactly you may
or may not know about the telecommunications networks. Verizon New York is a state telecommunications
utility, just like AT&T California, or CenturyLink Oregon, or AT&T Illinois, or etc., etc. These are
all state utilities. And they are telecommunications utilities. Now, most people don't know that they
are utilities. And let me just give you some very, very quick background. In 1984, AT&T was
one big group called Ma Bell. And Ma Bell basically controlled 80% of the entire United States
wired networks. It also controlled the long distance networks, which are calls between
states. Now, while we don't really think about distance today, which does come up in certain
places, the idea that there is an interstate call, meaning that it's between states, or an
intrastate call, meaning it's part of the state-based calling, is very important. And I'll
get to this in a moment. So in 1984, AT&T is broken up. It was seen that it was not available
to go compete on long distance or local service. And so in a civil suit, AT&T was separated,
and AT&T took over the long distance business, and it took over the internet business,
and seven baby Bells were created, local phone companies, holding companies, that would control
the state-wired infrastructure. Can you name them? Sure. In alphabetical order, they are
Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, Bell South, NYNEX Pacific Bell,
Southwestern Bell, and US West. Is that seven? I think that's seven. Well done. Well done.
Yeah. And what does NYNEX stand for? Oh, I know that one, but go ahead.
I know it, too. I'm just asking. New York, New England exchange, right?
No, New York, New England, and the x was for the future, imagination, things like that.
I'm right. I remember that. Now, you have to understand, there's all of these wires
all over the place, and they all are copper wires, and they're all on the poles. And in 1934,
way, way, way back, a law was passed called the Communications Act, which said everybody's
entitled to phone service no matter where you are, and basically, it had to be at fair and
reasonable rates, period. You in the middle of a mountaintop, or you in the middle of some ghetto,
or you in the middle of Park Avenue, it doesn't matter, you get phone service. So you can go to
the middle of, you know, you can go out in the West, and you go like to one of these prairie
towns, and there'd be a phone, and guaranteed. And this guaranteed that you had communications
with the rest of the world started because it was a right for you to communicate. This is a
premise that basically has been kind of in the mix for all these decades. Now, what happened?
In 1984, they're broken up. You have these seven companies that are all, they were called Baby
Bells, but they were really kind of fat. And they all wanted to be just like Ma Bell. And so
essentially, something happened in 1991 that most people don't know. Under the Clinton-Gore campaign,
Vice President Al Gore said, soon to be Vice President Al Gore says, we need the information
superhighway. We need to take the copper wires that have been in place for 20, 40, 50 years,
and we need to replace them with a fiber optic wire capable of 45 megabits in both directions,
and America would be finished by the year 2010. 45 megabits, huh? Yes. Okay. Now, the phone
companies, the Baby Bells, go, oh, my God, we'll do this. The government doesn't have to do this.
We will replace the copper wires in our state utilities, and we will give you a fiber optic
wire that can go to the home, and it will be guaranteed that it'll be 45 megabits in both
directions starting in 1993. What? Okay. So in New Jersey, there is a thing called Opportunity
New Jersey. Verizon, what is now Verizon New Jersey says, well, the state of New Jersey should
definitely have the entire state finished by the year 2010 with 45 megabit services to the home,
which is fiber optics, and if you just change the law to give us price caps, which is called
alternative regulations, we'll have the money to pay for this thing. So why don't you just
change the law and let us write off the wires quickly, and we will roll out the wire. By the
end of 2001, we will have 52% of the entire state of New Jersey with a fiber optic wire
capable of 45 megabits in both directions. This is in state law. Pennsylvania said, oh, well,
New Jersey is doing this. We're going to do this. So we will have the entire state of
Verizon Pennsylvania done by the year 2015, 100%. Rural, urban, and suburban areas will be treated
equally. It's in the state law. AT&T California goes, what is AT&T California says? Well,
we're going to do California. We'll have 5.5 million households with fiber optic services,
and we'll spend $16 billion, and it will be done by the year 2000. Guaranteed. It's in state law.
Massachusetts, we'll have 330,000 lines done by the year 2000. And so what happened was
they went to every state, they got the state laws changed, and then they basically didn't show up,
and they didn't change the wiring out in almost every state. However, at the same time, they went
to the FCC and said, excuse me, we want to offer video dial tone services, and we want to do a
fiber optic wire to the homes. And so they filed in pretty much 22 different locations to do a
fiber optic exchange where there'd be at least 15 million households wired with fiber optic by the
year 2000, which included Philadelphia, which included Pittsburgh, which included California's
San Francisco, which included San Diego, which included almost every major city.
2000 shows up. Of course, they hadn't done any of the work. Now, within this time frame,
so you have the wire, all right? You have copper wiring everywhere, and they're going to take a
wire, and they're going to put it in fiber optic wire, and then they don't show up. Okay. This is
round one. Now, they collected by this time at least $50 billion to go out and do this wiring,
and they did not do it. Now, how do I know this? I was a consultant to the companies at this point
in time. I was one of the leading experts in interactive services. In 1992, I rolled out
the first three-digit dialing service, 5-1-1 with Cox Newspapers.
That was you, 5-1-1?
That was me.
All right.
Okay. And it was an information service where they offered a call, and the operator would tell you
the local stores, very much like you have today. That application didn't exist when I started in
1992. I also helped roll out flat rate long distance. I did a study in 1993 that said,
how many people, what do you know about your phone bill, how much you pay for long distance
per minute, zero, got the answer correct. Three out of a thousand said, oh, we have no idea.
So, Sprint decides, well, if nobody knows how much they're paying, we'll just do a flat rate,
and they did a 10-cent-a-minute plan with Kansas Burger.
10-cent-a-minute, I remember that.
Yes, that was me. And so that-
What, that was you, 10-cents-a-minute?
I was the one who said the flat rate service should be charged. The 10-cent-a-minute was
their idea.
Okay. Wow.
Yeah. And so, but essentially, I was also at that point going, wait a second,
I was now a senior analyst, I was traveling around the world, I was speaking at all these
engagements, and I was given the financial plans for the deployment of fiber optics in
multiple states, and I realized that they were bordering on fraudulent.
The plans that were given were basically saying it was going to cost $750 to $1,000
per line in 1992 to do fiber to the home.
I wrote, in fact, I then stood up at the National Press Club and said, excuse me,
these guys are never going to do the wiring, they're never going to be able to do competition,
we should separate the wires from the companies and make sure that the money that's being
charged to local phone customers goes to pay for the wiring in plant, it's the conduit that
we care about, it's the fiber that we care about, it's the connectivity that we care about.
And I was pretty much blackballed and laughed at.
So were they even purchasing it? I mean, they weren't even doing plans,
not even any kind of surveying?
Plans, surveys.
Was fiber ever bought? Did it get, I mean...
Okay, so you want, so...
How did the nuts and bolts of it work?
Okay, so some secrets, some secrets. Number one, half of California was wired,
and they just didn't turn it on. Half of the United States was wired, known as dark fiber,
and they didn't turn it on. It's still in the ground in some states.
There's never been an audit of that.
Two, I was part of the plans and watching them say,
well, we're going to run this deployment here, we're doing this.
They did surveys, they did...
So Deloitte and Tisch did this $1.1 million report, a series of reports, about 2,000 pages,
and they said, well, here's the future, here's the future, we're going to have telemedicine,
we're going to have teleconferencing, we're going to have telemedicine, anything you want.
And they just handed it to the state, and the state, you know, it was a big thud,
you could hear it like drop on the...
Ooh, that's a lot of research.
And then suddenly, they didn't do anything.
Now, let's...
State by state's a little different.
The Ameritech regions, which is Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin,
they decided to start rolling out fiber, and they basically...
It's not the fancy stuff, but just fiber.
And then they stopped when they were merged,
and then that turned into a place, a thing called WOW,
where they did a fire sale, and they got rid of all of the wiring,
and that fiber was still on the ground.
SNET wired half a part of the state in 96, which is Connecticut, and then they stopped.
Wait, SNET, that's not one of the Bells?
Well, it was bought by Southwestern Bell in 1998, and combined.
Oh, and then, by the way, the Bells bought all the other Bells up, I should get to the merger.
And then you get like SBC, you get all these crazy...
So what happened was, is in 96, before they were all merged,
they made all these commitments.
They said, we're going to do the fiber optic wiring, and it all went through.
So all the plans, basically, they started getting all this money coming in,
and they decided not to roll out the wiring.
The second thing that happened, which was important, was they all started merging.
So Southwestern Bell, which was Texans, went out and started...
They bought PacBell, which is California.
They bought SNET, which is Southern New England Telephone,
claiming we're going to go into all these other regions, out of region,
and we're going to compete out of our region.
They bought Ameritech, which is the five states.
And they said, we will go into 30 cities outside of our region
for wireline broadband competition.
And the answer is, the FCC's final decision claimed that they only had to have three
customers per city as a fulfillment of the city obligation that they were competing.
Is that a joke? Three customers?
Three.
Where did they come up with that number?
It probably was six, and they lowered it.
It was three.
Where did they come up with this?
I could probably find more people in a bar.
Wait, wait, wait.
So there's three customers that they have in another city.
What exactly are you saying?
Okay, so when all these companies say, I'm competing in these other cities,
they had three people.
And then they're done.
They don't have any more obligations.
I see.
So as far as the FCC's concerned, oh, wow, you're really breaking into new markets.
It's like, yeah, all 24 of them.
We filed a complaint.
Customers.
We filed a complaint with the FCC saying this is ridiculous.
Multiple crimes and multiple proceedings.
I'll give you an example.
All of the current, you know, oh, they're doing, AT&T is supposed to do 12.5 million
fiber optic lines for its merger with DirecTV.
Okay.
Well, it turns out nobody's auditing that.
It's within 1,000 feet of the house.
And so it could be 5 billion.
AT&T has 76, you know, had all these different mergers,
takes 76 million locations in their territory.
And they have 3 million lines of fiber optics total.
So they were supposed to have 5.5 million in just California.
They're supposed to have 6 million in Ameritech region by the year 2000.
Now, I'm sitting there and, you know, nobody really wants to hear the story.
I write a book about this.
The first book I wrote was 1998.
I had Bob Metcalf, the forward of the book.
What's the title?
The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells.
Oh, okay.
That's interesting.
Yeah, and so that's one of the three books I wrote.
So I documented everything.
I did studies, reports, and everything else.
Nobody really cared.
Then they started announcing the next wave, which is wave number two,
which is Fios and U-verse.
Now, this is 2004.
They hadn't built anything yet.
They had been collecting $100 billion, $150 billion to do the wiring in every state.
Didn't do it.
Then they said, go back to the FCC, get rid of all the competition.
Because they—okay, I should backtrack.
In 1996, the networks were open to all competitors.
So I could go out and use my own internet provider.
I could use my own broadband provider over the wiring that was already part of the state utility.
And the FCC, starting in 2001, started saying, we're getting rid of all these rules.
You know, these guys need the money to go out and build out the fiber optic wires.
So they got rid of—there was—
by the year 2001, there were 9,335 small ISPs.
There were 324 ISPs in New York City.
This is—now, make the distinction.
These are the smaller ones, and this is where Title I, Title II comes in?
I'll get to that in a second, because that's what happened was,
they got rid of all the small ISPs by saying, well, the wiring should be Title I,
and broadband should be Title I, and therefore—
well, Title I doesn't require us to rent the nines to anybody.
It's private property.
Could you explain to us the difference between Title I and Title II for some of the listeners?
Sure.
The simplest way—
Some of the people here, too.
Yeah.
So the simplest thing is, Title I is common carriage, meaning—or
thought of as common carriage, meaning for hundreds of years, if there's a road,
that road's open, anybody could use that road, that's common carriage.
Title I is, that's private property, pay us a toll.
Or we could block you, we could degrade you, we could control you.
Title I is an information service, and Title II was the actual physical networks.
Now, the entire United States was always Title II.
Always.
All the wiring.
All the wiring that has been put in for the last—for all these years.
And I'll get back to the punchline of this.
So in 2001, they said, we have to get rid of Title II.
It's harming us.
We've got to go out and change all the laws.
And so what they do is, under the Republican regime, they basically said,
we're erasing the ability for competitors to use most of the networks.
We're making everything Title I.
And it killed off 7,000 ISPs within the period of four years.
And this is sort of the dawn of why net neutrality is what it is,
because it is a concession for this process, right?
Net neutrality is—I did the first show on net neutrality with Bill Moyers,
The Net at Risk.
I was featured on the show.
And basically what we said was, these guys are making all this stuff private property.
And so this is not a good thing.
We have—we paid for these networks.
We had the right to go out and use all these networks.
And so to get rid of all the competitors, and basically they lied.
And they said, oh, we're going to do fiber optics everywhere.
We're going to do the rollout.
19—2004, AT&T has—which is about to be AT&T, the new AT&T—says,
we are going to roll out U-verse, but you have to get rid of all the
regulations and all the competitors.
And we, as FIOS, the fiber optic wires, will do the fiber optic wires,
but you've got to get rid of the competitors.
AT&T rolls a bait and switch.
U-verse is a copper to the home service.
They lied to the public.
They have documents that said it was fiber to the home.
And then they rolled out U-verse, which is copper to the home,
with a fiber optic wire somewhere in the neighborhood.
Unbelievable, but true.
How did they get away with this?
In 21 states, one has to wonder why nobody said,
but that fiber-based is not really fiber.
It's only the copper that you reconditioned.
And the tax dollars that they were using for these
pretextual rollouts that they were doing, were they state tax dollars
or were they federal tax dollars?
Ah, they weren't tax dollars alone.
They were both taxes that were given as tax perks, quick depreciation.
But customers were being charged for all this.
Uh-huh.
Now, New York is going to shock you.
Here we go.
All right.
So it's 2004.
These guys don't roll out, pretty much don't roll out anything.
They basically get, okay.
But it's wave two.
So this is how we're going to bankroll it.
We got rid of the competition.
We need money for all our fiber that we're going to do.
Raise rates.
All of a sudden, yeah, yeah.
Raise rates.
But there's two parts to this, which is the first part is what I thought I knew.
And the second part is what we just found out about, which goes, what?
Okay.
Part one, Verizon goes into every state and says the fiber optic wire really is not a
separate service.
It's part of the state utility.
It should be included in the cost of service A and B.
It's title two.
What?
Okay.
So AT&T's fiber optic wire for files is a title two common carriage service when it's
put in.
Now they say, well, when you add these other services on top of it, it changes because
now it's suddenly interstate.
But the truth of the matter is it's on the books throughout the entire East Coast.
The fiber optic wire is title two.
Why?
Because in New York we have a quote, quote, a massive deployment of fiber optics and
losses are the reason why we're going to basically raise your rates because we're
rolling out this fiber optics.
And it's very important to the state.
The state should never have charged customers for these wires.
And the losses are artificial, which is what I'm about to tell you about why we're
suing the FCC.
So let me just summarize for a second.
From 2004 to 2010, they said, we're rolling out all this stuff.
And then 2010, they said, we're stopping and we're going to be a wireless company.
And they take the budgets that were part of the fiber optic wires for files.
And they say, we're going to use the exact same budget.
And we're using it for the wireless deployments only.
In other words, they illegally took billions of dollars per state and moved it from
the construction budgets of the state utility, which is still in place, to their
wireless deployment.
And that wiring, they don't show on the books from the wireless company.
We're talking about $2.8 billion in New York for three years.
Yeah, these are wires that consumers would have been able to get at retail at a
market rate.
But now these wires are being used as a back end or a backbone for a wireless service
that is run as a private service, a private company, and is not necessarily a service
that is treated as common carriage because it is everything on your cell phone that is
completely tiered and controlled.
Right.
So they take the wires that were supposed to be for the retail file service, the fiber
optic wires, and they take it and they move it to the wholesale and the backhaul to do
the wireless networks.
All right.
This happened throughout the entire United States.
In 2012, Verizon claimed that their wireless service was being done via the wireline
network budget.
Okay.
So 2010, I find the Verizon New York annual report and I had no idea what any of these
numbers mean.
I mean, literally, I've been looking at this for years.
These are state-based annual reports.
Nobody knows what it is.
I sent it to 15 different people.
Nobody has a clue, but all these numbers make no goddamn sense.
What I found was because of the way that the rules were, I don't understand all the
details yet.
The company was able to make local service unprofitable on purpose by dumping the
expenses of all the interstate services that were rated into the local budgets.
Local service went up 100% because these expenses, which should never have been dumped
in, were dumped into local service.
Local service lost $2.9 billion in 2017 based on a real report.
And I'm going, how the hell does state utility lose $2 billion a year?
Now, this is multiple companies doing this.
This is multiple state regulatory agencies allowing it to happen.
Is this a coordinated effort or is this just mass stupidity?
We are living in the era of the matrix in memory.
They have convinced everybody about all this stuff that the utilities don't exist, that
the networks are unprofitable.
So by 2001, they figure out that they should set the rules for the accounting, which are
by the FCC, getting back to the FCC.
The FCC rules are applied to the state utility budgets, and they froze the FCC accounting
to the year 2000.
19 years ago, so in 2000, local service was 65% of the revenues, it paid 65% of the expenses.
In 2017, local service is 20% of the revenues and it's still paying 65% of the expenses.
Now, I didn't know all this stuff and we run into – the irregulators basically is a
collection of old guys, heavy-duty people who I respect, lawyers, former assistant attorney
general of a state, former consumer advocate lawyers, and we all get together and we start
cross-referencing everything and we realize in 2015, wait a second.
So what they did was they froze all the rules so that the rules would basically always make
local service look unprofitable and dump all the expenses into local service while all
the other services, FIOS, the wireless networks, the backhaul networks, would have obscene
profit margins.
All of the interstate services have profit margins of 50%, 75%.
The local service lost $2.9 billion.
How does this all happen?
So we start going and digging.
2015, we file – 2014, we write a report, which kind of we know what we're talking
about, we really don't yet.
It's used for starting an investigation, which was settled in July of 2018 in New York.
We got back about $300 million, $500 million worth of fiber optic upgrades and the fixing
of the network.
But what happened was the FCC decides that the accounting rules are erased.
Now, the accounting rules were, quote, foreborn, meaning that they are in place but they don't
have to be – they don't have to be used.
And Verizon, in 2007, files with AT&T, and Verizon's attorney at the time is Brendan
Carr, current commissioner of the FCC.
Whoa.
Yes.
Not only is Brendan Carr the commissioner of the FCC, but Brendan Carr is also the lawyer
for the CTIA, the Wireless Association, in 2011, suing San Francisco over First Amendment
rights.
Wow.
That's what we would call in the law a conflict of interest.
A big one.
Absolutely.
This is a movie script here, really.
Wait, wait.
I haven't gotten to the point yet.
So in New York, local service paid $1.8 billion for corporate operations expense, which was
the executive pay, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the lawyers that are suing for net neutrality
to block net neutrality, and against local service, which had $1.1 billion.
It made local service lose $700 million on the books.
Now, you would ask, this is happening in every state.
No state has ever audited the books that we know of.
The state basically have not even know the books exist anymore, but they're still in
use.
The FCC claims, on our side, said, no, there's nothing wrong.
We don't have to look at your filings.
We filed 18 times with the FCC going, here's the numbers.
We have the former assistant chief of the pricing policy division who wrote a separate
report called the Hartman Memorandum.
Here's where the skeleton's buried.
They ignored us completely.
So in December 2018, they said, we are going to extend the rules for another six years.
Our group goes, okay, that's it.
We can't take it anymore.
We filed 18 times over the last five years.
We're suing, taking you to court.
That is the case.
That's quite—that's the most interesting background of a case that I've ever heard,
I have to say.
Now, let me ask you a couple of questions about the case, where it is, because I know
we're going to be conscious of time here, too.
Yeah, we only have five minutes left, so we have to wrap everything up in that time.
The case, I presume, since you're dealing with the FCC, you've got to be in federal
court.
Federal court, the D.C. circuit.
Okay, great.
And one issue I would have, if I were on the other side, is I would probably challenge
your standing to bring this suit.
I mean, the regulators, like you said, are a bunch of old guys, you know, that have standing
in the tech community, but not necessarily standing to challenge this.
I would think that somebody who would have standing would be someone like maybe a state
attorney general.
Why you?
Okay, so besides filing 18 times in this one docket and filing 143 times at the FCC
as our group with the different configurations, one of our guys is Mark Cooper.
He's the director of research for Consumer Federation of America, now a regulator, and
he had standing in 2003 for a consumer case.
We filed 143 pages, and they said that if the FCC lost, they'd be embarrassed.
So our feeling was just let it roll.
Well, you know, it's going to be an uphill battle, I think, right?
Because you're dealing with an agency and you have Chevron deference to agency decisions,
meaning that the courts are going to look to an agency and say, the agency does this
for a living.
They know best, so we're going to give whatever they decide to do more deference than we would
give somebody else.
Have you thought about that?
Doesn't the FCC know best, Bruce?
So we know best.
We have the guys, but there's a thing called our deference, which is slightly different,
which was the case.
We believe we have enough data to nail them.
Now, let me ask you this, and I think this is, I think, really gets to the crux of the
matter here.
You brought this suit.
You brought it recently.
You got over the standing hurdle.
What are you seeking?
What's the remedy you want here?
You want to seek an accounting?
You want to have the communications carriers open their books?
Two things.
Well, first, we're looking for donations.
I'm going to have to throw that into my plug.
Okay, go to irregulators.org if you want to donate, but what we're going to do is three
things.
One, we want the numbers fixed.
We want all the cross subsidies stopped.
We want all the money returned.
We want to have billions of dollars back per state, and so the state has to also do some
action after we prove that the FCC rules are bogus and causing all these massive losses.
When you say you want the money returned, to whom should the money be returned?
Because it seemed like the consumers paid a significant amount of this infrastructure
development.
We believe that the state utility has to be returned and that thousands of dollars should
be returned to the consumers via the wireless companies that's been cross subsidizing and
charging them.
But the entire state needs to be fixed.
We need to have infrastructure.
We need to have open networks.
We need to have people that can use – connectivity is the most important thing for America now.
So what's the next step in the case?
You guys have a court appearance, I presume, in D.C.?
July 22nd is when the brief is due.
Then the FCC comes back in September.
But right now we have to get the word out and we have to go out and start thinking about
the state cases.
Let the AGs show up and go, what do you mean you overcharged us $5 billion?
So that is the complaint in so few words is that there was a massive overcharge against
the public interest, and these are the steps you're laying out for restitution and actually
building something useful for the consumers, right?
This created a digital divide because they said we're not going to build up the networks
in areas.
No competition.
Prices are higher.
And where exactly, again, can we find out more about the case and possibly contribute
to the effort?
Irregulators.org.
Wow.
That's I-R-R.
Irregulators.
I like it.
That's fantastic.
Before we close, I just want to ask, have you had any kind of reaction from other than
denials from people in the industry, companies, consumer advocates, anything like that?
We've been working with some of the consumer advocates, but this is way past most people's
pay grades as far as knowledge.
There's so many moving parts that people can't get their hands around the fact that
it's $50 billion a year overcharging and that we're going to go after it.
And so my goal is to get people like you to start telling the story.
Yeah, or whistleblowers.
I mean, people that have inside knowledge, but also the public.
Yeah, definitely getting people to understand that this is their long reach and pulling
money right out of there.
Interesting point.
Are there people inside these companies that would have access to information that would
help prove what you're saying?
We had a potential whistleblower who basically showed that there were billions of dollars
being transferred to the wireless company from the wireline networks, but he didn't
want to show up.
I mean, they're, you know, scared for his job and family.
And to Emmanuel's point, you know, if this lawsuit proceeds and they get passed at a
26F conference and all the dispositive motions like summary judgment, motion to dismiss,
et cetera, discovery is going to be opened up.
You're not going to necessarily need a whistleblower.
You're going to have access to those books once discovery commences.
Yeah, the audits.
I was just thinking audits.
It seems like they've gotten away with that for so long as well.
But yeah, exactly.
Discovery is right for that.
With $1.8 billion being dumped into local service on the corporate operations expense
alone, which is the lawyers, lobbyists, not even in the state, not related to local service,
why is the AG going, what the hell are you guys doing?
Yeah, it's like a slush fund for their malfeasance.
A slush fund for their malfeasance is actually exactly what it is, yes.
Wow.
Bruce Kushnick, I got to thank you for coming in today and sharing all this with us.
It is a lot to digest, but I think our listeners will be very fascinated with this.
And again, the site is irregulators.org?
Irregulators.org.
And yeah, you guys really deserve all the support you can get to find the truth.
And I see a lot.
I see a lot here.
A lot of books, a lot of documentaries, a lot of research, research papers written in
the future about just what's happening here because wow, we always knew there was corruption.
We always knew there was money being wasted.
But something on this scale, it just boggles the mind.
And everybody's being overcharged right now.
So take out your wallets, ladies and gentlemen, and let's play.
Wow.
Well, Bruce, we look forward to updates and, of course, future conferences.
We hope you'll be giving more talks on this as well.
And we'll certainly keep our listeners appraised.
Thanks again for showing up.
Thanks a lot.
I had a great time.
oth at 2600.com is our email address.
This is Off The Hook.
You're listening to WBAI.
Have a good night.
oth at 2600.com.
oth at 2600.com.