at 1 p.m. at 60 Wall Street Atrium in downtown Manhattan.
The Community Advisory Board is tasked with reviewing programming goals
and policy decisions established by the station.
Again, the WBAI CAB meets December 15th at 1 p.m. at the 60 Wall Street Atrium
and you are invited to attend. Hope to see you there!
And you're listening to radio station WBAI, where the time is just about 8 o'clock.
And for at least one more week, that means it's time, yes, for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
And a very, very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Alex.
Hey!
You seem rather jubilant tonight, okay.
Would you rather I just said good evening?
Actually, I would be more dignified, but we'll discuss it after the show.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hi.
How you doing?
Our special guest tonight, Jason Scott from Archive.org and text files and all that wonderful stuff.
Hey there, hello.
Great to have you in the studio.
What do you think of our new studio?
Look at this.
Isn't it amazing?
It's pretty sweet.
I love it when you can actually see the world you're broadcasting to out the window.
And they can see us, too.
Those people in that high rise with binoculars, we've caught them.
They're looking at us right now.
It's an amazing thing to see what the people here at WBAI are capable of when they're not
being shut down by hostile outsiders.
But those days are gone.
What's not gone, though, is the need to raise funds to keep this place going.
We already have had some severe challenges directly because of the incidents of October,
where this radio station was shut down by rogue members of the national organization
that owns the license.
And one of the unfortunate side effects of that is that our landlord was not paid.
When you don't pay landlords, you know what happens?
Oftentimes, they get really cranky.
We're facing a potential loss of significant amounts of our space as a result.
I can't blame them for wanting to actually keep the place rented out.
We're trying to figure out solutions, ways, perhaps, of raising funds so that the rent
is always guaranteed.
I think that would be a really good idea.
But that's just one of the many challenges that we face on a daily basis here at WBAI.
That's why your call is so very, very important.
And that number is?
516-620-3602.
Thank you.
Because I was facing the other way, and I'm not good sometimes with the numbers.
We have a bunch of premiums still.
In fact, we got so carried away with our conversation last week about the Virgil Griffith case,
which we'll be updating in just a moment, that we forgot to ask for funds.
It was a fundraising edition, and we got so carried away.
And that's the kind of thing that happens in a place like this.
We just really get focused on the subject.
Now, imagine if this radio station were not here.
We wouldn't be able to do that.
We wouldn't be able to share the information with you.
We wouldn't be able to tell these stories of things going on in the hacker world,
and things going on in the technological world, and all kinds of updates that we've been
providing since 1988, when the very first edition of this show went on the air.
So, when you make that phone call to...
Phone number?
516-620-3602.
What you will be doing is voicing your support for the continuation of this dialogue.
Really, really important.
So, we have these premiums.
We have the full set of the Hacker Digest.
It's called Hacker Digest Full Set and Lifetime Subscription for a pledge of $100.
What that means is you'll get the Hacker Quarterly 2600 magazine in Digest form,
starting at volume one from 1984.
And it'll come to you in PDF format via email.
And you will get 35 volumes, one per year.
And then you will get one per year for every year that you or we exist into the future.
So, we'll see.
If the country doesn't exist anymore...
Actually, that wouldn't really matter.
If we become something else, I guess we'll continue with the magazine.
I don't know.
We're just going to keep going as long as we can.
Absolutely.
And how much is the pledge of over there?
That is a pledge of $100.
And what can you get 35 years worth for $100, let alone the years into the future?
I just told you, Rob.
Pay attention.
Hacker Digest.
35 years worth.
Okay.
What else could you possibly get 35 years worth of in one big lump, and then every year afterward?
I have to come up with something else now?
Oh, my goodness.
I'm asking the listeners.
This is a rhetorical...
Well, that's not a fair question.
They're never going to be able to find an answer to that, because there is no other...
You can't do that, can you?
Is there any other magazine, any other package?
None that I know of.
For $100?
Nope.
No, I think you're dreaming.
Yeah, definitely dreaming.
All right.
Well, we have other packages, too, for people that might want something else.
We have the Hacker Tote Bags, and I think that's for a pledge of $25.
My paper is cut off here, but if you go online to give2wbai.org, you can also see these items,
as well, in case you don't want to call.
Phone number?
516-620-3602.
What number were you about to give?
Oh, you don't want to know what number I was about to give.
Also, we have three-year subscriptions to 2600, the Hacker Quarterly, for a pledge of $50.
That's significantly reduced from the normal price.
So if you want to get an actual paper copy of a magazine delivered to you, yes, that still happens,
then give a call to phone number?
516-620-3602.
You do that really well.
I've been practicing.
Yeah, or go to give2wbai.org and look for 2600 three-year subscription.
And finally, finally, for a pledge of $100, we have the Hacker Portrait.
And Rob, I'm going to ask you to describe what that is, since you're intimately involved in it.
I am, in my other work as a fine artist.
I do paintings, and I've done many paintings for supporters of the show in the past,
but they've been on subjects that I've decided.
This time, you decide, because if you pledge for the Hacker Portrait for a donation level of $100 or more,
I will get in touch with you via email, and you will send me a digital photo,
either a link to a photo online or a digital file of a photo that you have,
and I will interpret that picture.
I will paint a portrait maybe of someone you love, maybe of someone you don't like so much,
maybe of someone you admire, but whoever it is, I will paint a portrait of that person for you.
If you call, 516-620-3602.
And for those of you who were listening a few weeks ago, I think on the 20th,
I was doing a bunch of sketches, live marker sketches of random hacker-related things in the studio.
I'm throwing one of those in with each of these Hacker Portraits.
I'm also sneaking one into each of those Hacker Tote Bags, if you're interested in those.
So a pledge of 516-620-3602 and a pledge of $100 or more will get you the Hacker Portrait.
I am not taking artistic commissions at the moment.
So this is the only way to commission a painting from me at this point in time.
And speaking of which, Rob, I have a question for you on that point.
A couple of weeks ago when you were proposing this, did somebody get a portrait of me?
Somebody did indeed get a portrait of you because one of the sketches I just scratched out in the studio
while we were on the phone with you was a picture of you.
So I don't know who it is. That's a luck of the draw type thing.
Wait, somebody specifically asked for a picture of Alex?
Nope, just somebody who went for the Hacker Tote Bag gets a picture of Alex thrown in.
It's a random picture, so they could get anybody.
Yeah, they could get a picture of anything.
I've done a stack of just random people, things, just hacker-related stuff.
It won't be you because how can you do a portrait of yourself?
I mean, I don't really enjoy doing self-portraits. I'm not my favorite subject.
Well, I have to say, the portrait that you did of me was very flattering.
I did send you a picture of that during the show, and that's what you get for not being in the studio.
I know. I think if I was in the studio, it would have been much less flattering.
How did you make a portrait of him if he wasn't in the studio?
I happen to know what he looks like.
Wow. Okay, well, I'm impressed.
I was very impressed. I mean, he's got real talent, this guy.
I mean, you were always saying he's a lot more talented than he looks.
I'm always saying that, Alex. Thank you for sharing that.
Absolutely.
All right. Well, again, the phone number to show your support for the Hacker Portrait
or any of the premiums that we've mentioned is?
516-620-3602.
Or you could sail on over to givetowbai.org.
I understand also there's a way to text and become a BAI buddy?
There is indeed. If you text WBAI to the shortcode, where is the shortcode?
I don't know. This new studio, all the signs are behind me, so I can't really read them.
If you text the shortcode 41444, if you text the letters WBAI to shortcode 41444,
then you can donate via text because you will get back a special link that will then take you through that process.
And what that means is that when you become a BAI buddy, that is,
you're donating a certain amount of money every month, and it can be $5, $10, $20,
something that won't really hit you that hard.
But when you add it up over a year, it's a good source of income for the radio station.
It keeps us going. Now, you might note it's mid-December,
practically mid-December, and we're in the middle of a fund drive.
And usually, if you look back in history, we have a December fund drive.
But this isn't it. We're still in the fall fund drive.
Yeah, it's finally happened, where the fund drives have merged together.
But the reason we're forced to do this is because we were off the air for a couple of weeks,
and we lost a significant number of subscribers as a result.
And I want to thank those people, because you voted.
You voted saying, this is unacceptable.
When we were taken over and replaced with CAN programming from California,
you said, no, this is not the BAI that I support.
And it's because of that that we realized we had a lot of support for getting the station back.
We went to court. Yeah, we actually had to go to court to get motions filed
and to get those people out of power. They're out of power now.
There's a new interim executive director,
and the people running Pacifica seem to get what BAI is about a little bit more.
We still have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of recovery.
But this is part of the recovery process.
And a lot of questions, I think, that remain unanswered as well.
And in particular, how much money did Pacifica spend that WBAI was raising
and could have been used to fund the station's operations on their lawyers?
These are questions that I am going to continue asking on the air
until we actually get answers to these questions, because I guarantee you,
it was a significant amount of money.
And when I was at the First Appellate Division for the oral argument
about the temporary restraining order, the first restraining order,
there was a series of them.
It's very complicated to remember the whole history of how we arrived
at winning back the station.
But I had spoken directly with the opposing counsel
and asked if they were operating pro bono, and she said that they were not.
So I would love to see what those bills are,
and I would love to see Pacifica stop crying about WBAI's finances
and start disclosing what they actually paid to try to destroy this particular station
that you're listening to right now.
Needless to say, your support goes to keeping this place alive.
It's not going towards paying for Wall Street lawyers or anything like that.
It's going to WBAI, and that is what matters right now.
We have to repair relationships with landlords and all kinds of other people
that were cast aside when the evildoers came in.
All right, but you know what? We survived.
Imagine your favorite radio station getting a format change
and listeners overturning that.
It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen in the commercial radio world.
It happened here. It happened here.
That is the power that we, as both listeners and programmers,
have in a situation like this.
So we heard you, and hopefully we'll hear you again when you call a phone number.
516-620-3602.
And please pledge whatever you can afford.
And I think it bears mentioning that the way to prevent this from happening again
and again and again is to pledge.
And I think the best way to pledge is to become a WBAI buddy.
This is more akin to the European-style fundraising that we've seen
with stations like Radio Popolare in Italy.
I know we've all, well, many of us have been there to their conferences.
Well, you, me, and Kyle have all been to their neck of the woods.
And the way they raise funds, they have subscribers,
a lot of subscribers who pay a certain amount every month.
And there's actually, they do it a little bit differently.
They have a minimum amount.
In other words, you can't pledge less than a certain amount.
So they get a lot of people, I think it's 100 euro is the minimum.
And we have smaller levels as well.
But they get a good amount of funding that way.
They get a good amount of funding, and they are allowed to,
it allows them to plan ahead significantly,
to have parties and do less fundraising, which is wonderful.
Yeah, we've seen that work in places, as you said, like Italy,
as well as Austria and other parts of Europe.
And it totally changes the dynamic and the pressures that producers
and people that want to just talk about tech or hacking in general,
instead of the nuances of non-commercial radio.
We're in it for all of the above, but yeah, absolutely.
It frees up producers to spend less time chasing down fulfillment stuff
or whatever sort of things that need nurturing in the background here.
And we're really about keeping the dialogue and the resource here
available for all types of programming.
But in particular, we would prefer to focus on our show.
Yeah, it should be pointed out, too, that at that particular radio station in Italy,
people pledge for the radio station.
There aren't a lot of tote bags or T-shirts or anything like that going out.
It's about the radio station. That's what people subscribe to.
And I think that's what we need to keep in mind here.
In order to recover, people have to not necessarily be looking for the best deal
as far as what kind of item you want, but do you want to support the radio station?
If so, give a call. 516-620-3602.
See what I did there? I took some of the number. I'm learning it slowly.
I appreciate you sharing this burden.
It's worth mentioning also that these donations and pledges,
they are a non-taxable contribution.
I'm sorry. Yeah, it's a tax-deductible contribution
as the station itself is a nonprofit.
And we also want to emphasize just that it is about the programming itself.
And speaking of the programming itself, we have an announcement.
Is that right, Rob? You just hit me with this as we walked in the door.
Yes. We have an announcement.
For those of you who listen to us live, this is important.
And for those of you in the studio, I'm sorry,
but you're going to have to wake up an hour earlier on Wednesdays
because we are going back to the 7 p.m. Eastern time slot that we used to have.
Oh, my God. Okay. Just to give people a history of this,
we were on at 7 p.m., then we got moved to 8 p.m.,
then we got moved back to 7 p.m., then we got moved back to 8 p.m.
So now you're telling me we're going back to 7 p.m. for the third time?
We are. Effective next week, we are going back to 7 p.m.
Our colleague, Rachel Selang, her show, Women Fight Back,
which has been broadcasting 7 p.m. Wednesdays, is now moving to Fridays from 3 to 5.
But I listened to that show on the way in. What do I listen to now?
Well, you're going to have to find something else to listen to.
I don't know what will be on before us.
That's a good show. That's a very good show.
And now it's a two-hour show, but it's on Fridays in the afternoon.
So if you are listening to us, you will have to tune in at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Eastern time, U.S.
She has another hour now. She has a two-hour show.
She does.
Wow. Okay. All right. Well, good for her. I'm happy.
Absolutely. She does excellent work. We're going to miss her on Wednesday nights,
but she's going to do excellent work on Friday nights.
So 7 p.m. starting next week.
Yep. Off the Hook will be on at 7 p.m. starting next week.
How about that? You can write to us, always, at OTH at 2600.com.
Now, I mentioned we have Jason Scott in the studio. I don't want to waste this opportunity.
Jason, as you know, has worked for Archive.org and is doing all kinds of amazing things.
He's going to be talking to us about the Yahoo Group shutdown, which is in full effect right now.
I just wanted to update people on the story from last week,
where we talked about our friend Virgil Griffith and the problems,
the trouble he's in for traveling to North Korea without permission.
And, boy, you know, we said that he was out on bail,
and that turns out to be inaccurate because while he was granted bail, he was not released.
Is that correct, Alex, how I'm saying it?
Yeah, that's correct.
So I believe it was a central district court judge, a federal court judge in California,
had authorized his release on bail, which is done through a release order.
So there was a release order, but that didn't happen very, very quickly.
And then the government had applied for a stay of the release order
because the case is going to be transferred entirely over to the Southern District of New York.
They are the federal district court that has jurisdiction, primary jurisdiction over this case.
Why that is is not necessarily so clear to anybody
that why the Southern District of New York is the situs of where all the action is going to happen.
But because it is, and because the case is filed there, they have primary jurisdiction over this.
So what the government did, what the Department of Justice did,
was they asked the Southern District Court judge,
I believe it was Judge Denise Coate, for a stay of the release order, and that was granted.
And that means that he is going to remain in federal custody until he is shipped and transferred over to New York,
where the government is then going to have an opportunity to appeal that release order.
And the judge that is going to have primary jurisdiction over this entire case
will then determine whether or not he continues to be held in custody or if he's going to be released on bail.
Unbelievable.
Now, you know, I'm super disappointed in the way this case has been reported and how it's been received.
Maybe it's because I know him personally.
Maybe it's because I'm aware of the dirty tricks that are played on the federal level.
All I know is last May when he went voluntarily to talk to the FBI, he went without a lawyer.
He went despite warnings that you should not trust the FBI.
You should never talk to law enforcement without a lawyer.
Can you say that, Alex, please?
Coming from a lawyer, I think it might make sense.
I can say that as a matter of fact.
You should not be talking to law enforcement without a lawyer.
Never. Don't ever do it.
You know, he was so trusting of them because he was so eager about the trip he had made,
and he was sharing things like newspapers and pictures that he had taken.
He told them everything he did, and he was so happy because, you know, I saw him that night afterwards.
He was so happy that they got it, that they understood that he wasn't a menace,
that he went there out of curiosity, and he told them everything he learned,
and I believe he thought he was helping them.
So, months later, months later, to be broadsided like this, it just ...
That in itself is tragic, just to see how somebody was trusting of an agency only to be prosecuted,
and I can't help but imagine that this might have something to do with the relations between
the Trump administration and the North Korean regime.
They were great at the time, back in May of this year.
They were in love, supposedly, according to Donald Trump, and now not so much.
So, I don't know if that is the reason.
I don't know how the FBI relates to the Trump administration.
I know right now they're insulting each other, but still, you know,
the director is appointed by the president.
There could be some kind of relation.
I don't know.
It doesn't make sense to me, and the way the case is being reported leads to people inevitably saying,
yeah, he should rot in jail because he's a traitor.
A traitor, because he went to a conference in a foreign country,
and basically told people things that can be found on the internet pretty easily.
I mean, it's very difficult, I think, to make out a case for treachery with these very,
very sparse facts as we know them right now.
I mean, this is a guy who went over to North Korea.
Many people, thousands of people, thousands of Americans have gone over to North Korea
over the course of many years.
He just happens to be the only one that I know of that's been prosecuted for it.
I went there.
I told them about my trip there.
No doubt that was one of the inspirations because the people who go there are enthusiastic about going there,
and anybody who wants to explore wants to explore weird places, and North Korea is a very weird place.
Yeah, but I mean, on the other hand, when you went there, there wasn't a travel ban for U.S. citizens in effect.
Right, but let me just tell you, that travel ban came about solely through Donald Trump and oil executive Rex Tillerson.
So, you know, yeah, I know, I know they made the law, but they made the law.
I mean, for God's sake, people, wake up.
We're talking about an oil baron and an idiot making laws, and we're supposed to take those things seriously.
I know he should have.
In retrospect, it was a bad move to just go anyway, but the weird thing is he asked permission.
You know, you could just go and not ask permission, but he was very open and honest about going,
and he admitted when he came back, yes, I violated that rule.
But that's all he violated.
Well, I'll tell you this.
If we didn't follow laws that were made by idiots, we would just be living in complete anarchy right now.
I mean, we'd have no laws.
That looks better every day.
But, you know, look, I'll tell you.
This whole thing, like I said, this case for treachery, I think, is totally blown out of proportion.
The treachery of treason.
Is treachery the actual word they use?
I think they use, well, they might use treason.
I can't recall specifically what it was, but it was something to that effect.
What I find somewhat troubling, too, is the fact that you have these allegations.
They're bare-bones allegations in a complaint.
You don't try a complaint.
You don't try the criminal complaint.
You try the case on the basis of the evidence.
Where's the evidence here?
It has not been adduced.
We don't know what it is.
He's not gone to trial.
And I just find it so inappropriate for law enforcement, whether it's the police department,
a local police department, the FBI, or the Department of Justice, to start tweeting about
indictments and arrests of individuals claiming that they did X and they did Y and they did Z.
And then you have to go to a website.
And at the bottom of the website, it states that these are allegations and there is a
presumption of innocence.
I just feel like there is a deliberate ploy here to try to taint the jury pool.
And it seems wholly inappropriate for law enforcement to be engaging in activity like that.
I feel like in 10 years, we're going to look back on that practice and say, why the hell
did we tolerate that?
People should keep their mouths shut.
But isn't this standard practice whenever law enforcement arrests somebody, they put
out a press release and try to make them as guilty as possible to the public?
Well, it's tainting the jury pool.
But ordinarily, that jury pool is very localized.
Here, when you're doing it on the internet, with the U.S. Department of Justice Twitter
feed, which has probably millions of followers, I don't know, at least hundreds of thousands,
you're tainting the jury pool and you're tainting public opinion in a very effective matter.
I mean, the whole problem we have with misinformation and disinformation and fake news is all borne
out when we have allegations against a person who is presumed innocent being touted by the
Department of Justice.
I mean, and these are very bare bones allegations.
Like I said last week, I think this is all going to hinge on whether or not what Virgil
did in North Korea can be classified as, quote unquote, services to North Korea.
And I think based on a conversation that we had last week with a colleague of his, an
Italian colleague of his, who went over to North Korea with him and described in great
detail what it was he talked about, it's going to be very difficult for the government to
make out that case.
So, you know, look, he's got an excellent lawyer, Brian Klein, who represented the WannaCry,
WannaCrypt hero who turned off that massive ransomware campaign that was affecting hospitals
and whatnot.
Marcus Hutchins, I believe his name was, who was then picked up in DEFCON.
So this is an experienced attorney who used to be a federal prosecutor.
I think he's going to be doing a good job on this case.
We haven't heard a lot from him, but we don't necessarily know where Virgil is right now
yet either.
I think that the judge's order that basically stayed his release on bail was on December
4th.
And the literal text that she wrote on the order when she granted this was, granted the
defendant shall be brought to the Southern District of New York as expeditiously as possible.
That was seven days ago.
So he should be here very, very soon.
And I think we'll be hearing more about this release order, its appeal, and whether or
not Virgil will be out on bail.
My guess is I think he will be.
I certainly hope so, because just the way this whole thing came about, they arrested
him on Thanksgiving at an airport when he was on his way to one of his parents' homes,
I believe in Baltimore.
Really, that's how you have to do it.
And then because the courts were closed for the Thanksgiving weekend, he couldn't even
be seen in court until Monday.
That, to me, is just vile behavior.
This is not a guy that's going to run, who has ever done anything like that in the past.
Anyway, this is my opinion.
I'm open to being challenged.
I know, Jason, you might have some thoughts on this as well from what you've heard so far.
My opinions, Emanuel, are basically that I get a very warm sense of déjà vu with you,
which is that you have very little tolerance for technical people being hit with the blunt
force of the court system in cartoonish definition of their mores, beliefs, and what they are
trying to do in this world, and that you will let the courts run through their slow
grind, but you refuse to ever let shadow fall upon the face of the person going through
the system.
And that's my favorite inspiring thing about you over the last 20 years.
Not every one of those people was entirely nice.
Not every one of those people didn't commit some sort of problem, but you never let them
live in shadow.
And I hope that the listeners over the years have translated that to other people, either
in their lives or that they know of, who have gone through this sort of system and saying
that that person will know that somebody on the outside is still thinking of them.
Because the first thing that happens when you go through the system is you are isolated
and made to feel that everyone has forgotten about you and that you are going to be forgotten.
And when you get told that somebody is thinking of you on the outside, that is part of surviving
through that system.
So I'm not really qualified to discuss specifics of Virgil's case.
I know Virgil.
I've hung out with Virgil.
Not in North Korea, but I've hung out with Virgil.
And to me, it's more important that, once again, I'm seeing Emmanuel stand up for technical
people being given the benefit of the doubt.
Thank you.
That's very well said.
But I think the reason why I feel this obligation to do that is because the technical crimes
that these people are accused of are never really understood.
When I look at the complaint against Virgil, I see a lot of fear about cryptocurrency.
I see a lot of fear about peer-to-peer networks.
And I think that's what's really on trial here.
You have this guy who's super intelligent, who went to an enemy regime and hung out there,
went to a conference where people were falling asleep because it was only 100 people and
the program wasn't really planned out that well.
But just because of what he might have been able to do in a scenario, it really got people
fantasizing and coming up with worst-case scenarios.
When in actuality, this is one of the most open and honest people that I know who would
answer any question that you asked him and did that with the FBI.
And I almost believed when he told me, yeah, they completely understood and they appreciated
what I did.
I thought, okay, you know what?
Maybe things have changed.
Maybe the FBI is more open and honest.
But no, it was a trap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's quite interesting, too, when you think about the timeline here.
He was interviewed by the FBI back in May.
And then in November, I think it was November 12th, which was just this past November 12th,
that was when he provided his cell phone to the FBI for forensic analysis.
They took a copy of that cell phone.
Did he have to do that?
No, he didn't have to do that.
But was he represented by a lawyer when they asked him this?
That is unknown.
My guess would be no, because I don't think a good lawyer would have told him, make the
FBI, get a warrant, let them show probable cause that there will be evidence found on
that device.
Being naive is a crime.
He's guilty of that crime for sure.
But I don't think they're charging him with that.
He should have had a lawyer with him both times.
And a lot of people are saying, yeah, he should rot in jail because he's being accused of treason.
Other people are saying he should rot in jail because he was stupid and talked to the FBI.
He can't have it both ways, obviously, but it just seems like everybody is condemning
him.
And really the only thing that I can say that he is guilty of is, like I said, being naive.
Yeah, he's guilty of taking that trip.
I mean, I wasn't here last week, but I was listening.
And according to what your guest was saying, what he actually did over there, he wasn't
giving away any American secrets.
Cryptocurrency is not American property.
It's out there.
It's everywhere.
Exactly.
And it's out there because of how accessible and easy it is to use for someone inclined.
So it sounds like what he's actually guilty of doing over there is, in conversation, basically
the equivalent of what you would get if you type, how do I bitcoin into Google?
And for that, he's being treated like public enemy number one.
Well, you know, somebody from North Korea could call this radio program and ask us a
question, and we might answer that question.
And it basically is the same thing.
Or we might print an article in the magazine about this, and maybe somebody in North Korea
will read that.
The same basic thing.
So what Virgil did was violate the travel ban.
I don't think, and we should look this up, but I don't think anyone has ever been prosecuted
for traveling to North Korea before.
I don't think that has ever happened in this country.
So I can sort of understand somebody thinking, oh, it's not that big a deal if I just go
anyway, especially if there's something that looks interesting.
But I can guarantee you, the conference was not the thing that drew him there.
It was going to North Korea because as a hacker, yeah, we're fascinated by things that are
mysterious and weird.
You know, there's one other component to this as well that I don't think we touched on last
week, but which is, I think, a critical part of the complaint, too, because the complaint
is also a conspiracy charge.
And there is one paragraph that says this.
After the DPRK cryptocurrency conference, it's interesting that they're styling it as
well as a cryptocurrency conference because it really was a blockchain conference, Griffith
began formulating plans to facilitate the exchange of cryptocurrency one, which I believe,
since he worked for the Ethereum Foundation, which was very likely Ethereum, began plans
to facilitate the exchange of cryptocurrency one between the DPRK and South Korea.
Griffith acknowledged that assisting with such an exchange would violate sanctions against
the DPRK, but stated he wished to return to the DPRK and attend the same DPRK cryptocurrency
conference the following year.
And last, I checked, wishing to do something is not a crime.
And a lot of attention has been drawn to him saying, yes, I need to figure out how to transfer
cryptocurrency from North Korea to South Korea.
It seems to me like a proof of concept of a potential security hole, a potential way
around sanctions, a potential experiment.
There's no evidence that I've seen that he actually was planning on doing that, but simply
trying to think of how it could be done, which is what anybody who is interested in
keeping the sanctions probably would want to do as well.
True.
However, in the criminal law, we can still prosecute attempted crimes.
There's a crime of attempted murder, right?
So, an attempt to evade the sanctions like this could be a prosecutable offense.
But what was the attempt?
Thinking about it?
No, no, no.
And here's where the conspiracy charge comes into play here because you can only have a
conspiracy if there's one or two, I'm sorry, two or more people who conspire to do something
illegal and one of them commits an overt act in furtherance of that conspiracy.
But what was the overt act?
Well, that's what we don't know just yet.
But again, you don't try a complaint.
You try the evidence in a case.
And that's what we don't have yet.
So, by them bringing this as a conspiracy charge, there must be some kind of underlying
evidence that we don't yet know about whatever that act was in furtherance of the conspiracy.
I think it's more anxiety about competing with the fiat currency, the strength of the
technology that he was knowledgeable about, and more making an example to the public at
insofar as, you know, we'll take a dim view of any kind of knowledge transfer, lest you
be caught up in this as this person.
And they can use that name to threaten, essentially, people who are knowledgeable.
And the concept, however short-sighted, would serve that purpose as making an example.
The idea that North Korea is funding homegrown missiles based on you sharing with them about
blockchain technology, that is an awesome specter.
But it's not necessarily what happened.
And I think it was very short-sighted.
It's just that if we weren't paying attention, that would have been how they went about creating
this example to be foreboding for people in the future.
But it's like, you know, he's being kind of swept up.
And that example, I don't know what the parallel would be, but it's like the oil sanctions.
Him saying, you know, by the way, you could just pump the oil in the middle of the sea.
And here, I'll sell you some GPS stuff to help you do it.
And then I'm going to be on the other boat.
It's like, he may have had the knowledge necessarily, but was he physically setting up their state-run accounts?
And again, also, I read Dear Leader, Great Leader, a book this year that is all about
the history of the regime in North Korea.
This kind of missile development and them evading sanctions is not a new concept.
And I would say that the, again, short-sightedness of their ability to use cryptocurrency predates
anything Virgil was doing.
So again, this is more about the example and sweeping up someone because of that anxiety
and fear over the competition that this currency may be.
And then combined with that specter of fear over missiles.
It should be pointed out that there's no allegation as of yet that he actually did anything equivalent
to supplying any kind of service to North Korean regime.
We're going to leave it there because we have other things to talk about this week.
But please write to us if you have thoughts and feelings on this.
It's an important case.
It's something that I think we should be focusing on because people are being swayed one way
or another by propaganda.
And there's really no other way to phrase it.
And we should know when we're being manipulated.
So we'd like to discuss it both ways.
See if maybe we're being naive.
Maybe people are being misled.
There is somebody in prison as a result of this.
And it could easily be somebody else as well.
So it's important to always keep updated on that.
And no doubt, knowing Virgil, he's in the system right now.
And he's paying close attention to that system.
Learning all kinds of weird things about a strange environment.
It's a horrible thing to have happen to somebody.
But as a hacker, he's going to notice things that other people don't notice.
And he's going to share that.
We'll have that to look forward to someday.
Let's just hope that he gets out of the hell that he's in right now.
Okay.
Moving back to, Jason, what you've been up to lately.
I know a lot of people are affected by this, including people here at WBAI who use Yahoo Groups.
And Yahoo is shutting down.
Well, they're not really shutting down the groups per se as far as mailing lists go.
But they're making it a lot harder.
And they're no longer keeping attachments and files that people have come to depend upon.
Can you sum up basically what's going on?
Yeah.
So first you've got to know that the corpse of Yahoo was bought by Verizon.
Along with a bunch of other stuff that Verizon bought.
Okay.
And there's two functionalities to a lot of these businesses, like Yahoo and so on.
One of them is just audience, to be able to turn over audience.
Yahoo News is still a surprising amount of people's homepage.
Like that's this built-in audience that you want.
But the other part that Yahoo bought over the years were these user hosting and content
and the ability of people to make their own collections of mailing lists like we discussed
and web pages and so on.
And progressively, a lot of these companies have been moving towards getting out of that business.
And they're all doing it in an extremely brutal, very fast, technically not awesome way.
And the latest one to get the attention of me and the people who work in this space is Yahoo Groups,
which is the decades-long Yahoo mailing list function, which is, again, owned by Verizon.
There's no real Yahoo.
It's Verizon.
And it's being done really clunkily to begin with, but on top of it, they gave everybody a month and change
to be aware of the fact that they were going to stop having public mailing lists
and they were going to get rid of access to any files, attachments, anything that wasn't an email message.
So in theory, they're kind of still in the mailing list business,
but they're about to wipe out millions upon millions of files.
They're about to make it that you can't look at these mailing lists unless you're a member
and you have been specifically invited by somebody to be a part of it.
And they're doing it very quickly.
In fact, this Saturday, it will no longer be publicly accessible.
And then by the end of January, they've now extended it to January,
if you are an admin, you can request your files.
We have seen them take upwards of 30 days to get you your files and stuff.
So I do encourage people to, if they find themselves, a lot of people out there
who might have had either membership or adminning of Yahoo Groups they don't know about
are getting random messages from Yahoo set apart by weeks even, which tells me they're doing it.
We know there's at least five million groups.
Five million groups?
Yeah, there's about five million.
So they're coming in batches because mail is hard.
And so you might get one today and you'll get one tomorrow and you might think it's a repeat.
But the answer is no, no, that's a beekeeping group that you joined in 1998.
And the second one is a really important Mr. Robot fan group that you joined,
you know, whatever, ironically, about five years ago.
But I believe as a member, you can get an archive of the group and the files.
Is that not right?
You can get an archive of your files.
I believe you can't get an archive of the other files.
I mean, you can request them, but not after Saturday.
Okay, so if somebody is on a Yahoo Group now, they need to do that quickly.
Yes.
There are a lot of groups who are alerted to this and we've seen them kind of go in and desperately try to get it.
There are historical groups that were, you know, the beginning of fandoms and video blogging
and a lot of other subcultures for whom a Yahoo Group was the core of their group,
even if they've floated away and they didn't know that these message archives were going away.
And so my group, Archive Team, which is a volunteer group,
had been working pretty hard to try to grab as much as we could.
I can imagine.
And then Yahoo blocked us earlier this week.
Wait, hold on a second.
Why would Yahoo block you from trying to archive history?
They've quoted everything from,
this violates our terms of service for you to aggressively download,
to there's too much of it, you know, like you're causing strain on our capacity.
This is not the first time I've had us back up a shutting down service
and then they lock themselves down or try to shut down faster
because they didn't think there'd be an actual bank run of this data.
So you're taxing Verizon's capacity?
We appear to be.
Wow.
Well, congratulations on that for one thing, but I don't believe it.
I'm certain they can handle it.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's interesting to watch this progression.
And you're the person who likes to get all the huge overarching arch
and we're, what, 45 minutes into the hour.
So I'll just skip to this glory.
So the reason they're all doing this, you're going to see more and more of this.
And it's all SESTA-FOSTA.
All what now?
SESTA-FOSTA, which are the two anti-trafficking quote-unquote laws that have been passed,
what they did, so it's a great example of a good,
of a well-stated mission being implemented very poorly.
So SESTA-FOSTA is meant to prevent sex trafficking and human trafficking.
And the way that it does it is by saying anything that looks like people are being sold
or selling services that include people or sexual services,
they're probably being human trafficked.
Therefore, anything that's doing that is liable.
And here's the important part, including any service that is hosting them.
Okay.
That is a change to the standard, I believe it's the 230 Communications Act of the 1990s,
which turned a lot of ISPs into the equivalent of if you say something illegal to somebody over a phone line,
the phone company isn't liable because the phone company is just transmitting the data.
Common carriers.
Yeah.
That's what ISPs were.
SESTA-FOSTA partially ended that.
Verizon and other companies, being who they are, which as you know,
a craven bunch of hamsters, are saying, well, if anything could possibly have anything like this,
kill it as fast as you can.
And so that's what they're doing.
They're killing any groups that have attachments because the theory is those files could be anything.
They could be adult images, and we wouldn't know.
We would be liable.
Let's kill it.
So it's all this reflexive, you know, SESTA-FOSTA happened a couple years ago,
and now we're just seeing the waves, and this is the next wave.
And they don't care.
It's just any library might have a dirty book, so let's burn the libraries,
and we'll be sure that none of them have it.
Well, now that you explain it that way, it makes sense.
Sure.
Libraries should be on fire now.
Yeah.
All right.
I get it.
Yeah.
I mean, you bring up a really interesting point here, too,
and I think the law you were referencing was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
That's it.
Which gives safe harbor immunity to interactive computer services for any of the content that passes through their networks.
And that's what, you know, ostensibly allowed the Internet and giants like Facebook to proliferate
because they weren't not necessarily regulating that which was on their networks,
and they could grow without fear of having liability for any of the speech that was passing through their channels or forums, etc.
But you're right.
The SESTA-FOSTA issue becomes a compliance problem.
Right.
And compliance problems cost money.
So then they have to do a business calculus,
which is if the cost of compliance is not greater than or equal to the profit being made from the operations with which –
or rather that which must comply with the law, then it doesn't make economic sense to have those operations anymore.
And that's why they're shutting them down.
Right.
And one of the real educations people are getting, unfortunately, is how truly blunt force these companies,
these friendly companies that have been pulling up all of everybody's culture for so many years and profiting off it,
will move if they at all feel threatened.
You know, the day after SESTA-FOSTA passed, Craigslist killed all dating services.
Just deleted all of them.
Not because they thought they were doing anything illegal.
Not because they were in any way worried about, you know, like, we know this is a problem.
But they said we can't even take the risk.
We can't even possibly do it.
And they just removed an entire component of their business the next day.
And, you know, it's a really good example.
Again, it sounds great on the label.
The can sounds great.
You know, wow, human trafficking is terrible.
It is an acknowledged terrible violation of human rights.
But when you open the can, you're mostly finding worms.
You know, we have a number of WBAI and Pacifica mailing lists on Yahoo groups.
And I might be going out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure there was no human trafficking taking place on any of those lists.
Is there some way to appease these people that seem to think there's a risk in every service they provide?
I mean, obviously human trafficking is bad, but to simply claim that every single mailing list is a potential site for that seems horribly backwards.
Well, I sound completely off in another field when I talk like this.
But I'm hoping that everyone starts to realize that a lot of these social cultural services we've been using,
which have been on the behest of this weird let's spend lots of VC money and give it for free model,
really deserve to be replaced by nonprofit community board transparent organizations.
That there should be some, I mean, they'll deal with corruption and ups and downs in politics like any other organization.
But that fundamentally they should have a clear mission statement.
We're going to host mailing lists.
We'll have a clear arbitration and a clear archival shutdown, community dispute, everything,
as opposed to now where it's just random.
A TV show comes out that's based on a mailing list and they put an ad for it on every mailing list because they can.
It's just you're completely running wild.
I couldn't agree with you more because the economics of mailing lists as they exist now are fundamentally, I think,
flawed because there just isn't enough data for a for-profit company to mine from email headers and mailing list groups relative to things like apps and platforms.
The amount of data that you can get from somebody's phone is going to be exponentially greater than that which you can get from an email header.
And it just doesn't make sense for them to continue to mine this type of email-related data.
This is why you had Google, I think maybe it was two, possibly even three years ago, saying,
look, we're just not going to mine Gmail anymore for your personal information or advertising purposes.
Because there just isn't enough there to make economic sense to operate it.
So if a not-for-profit operated this in a responsible fashion that was accountable to its own communities, that would solve the problem.
Right. I happen to go further and think there's a lot of other services that could also go in this direction.
But at the very least, these self-contained, very obvious things like anything that's a rounding error to a company.
Well, one point that I would love to make is, you know, so many people are so angry about this being shut down.
Wouldn't it be great if, let's say, Yahoo, which is synonymous now with Verizon, were to say, OK, it's not profitable, but people still like it.
Let's spin this off to a not-for-profit arm or a not-for-profit entity that we are going to establish and maybe we'll use it as a tax write-off.
Something like that, that would actually benefit the public good, but everything seems to be driven by profit and data these days.
And it's a dystopia, unfortunately, of our own making.
And the sheer cultural value of what's being lost can't be understated.
I mean, this started Yahoo, What's Now Yahoo Groups, was started in 1997 by a guy called Mark Fletcher, who started it as a service called OneList.
And from there, it was bought by an outfit called eGroups in 1999, and Yahoo bought eGroups in 2000.
But this is 22 years' worth of email lists, what under Yahoo's control became more of a web forum for people who wanted to use it that way.
And it's really countless subjects, serious, goofy, important, trivial, whatever.
But that is years and years of internet history, internet culture.
And there are email lists that are going to be deleted that I basically grew up on.
And I'm not the only one.
And this is really sad.
I think what happens here is when you trust a company with things like this, you really have to trust them because they can delete it at any time.
Unless you're running something yourself, there's no guarantee that it's going to stick around.
They can change their mind at a moment's notice.
Yeah.
Traditionally, what people have said is, oh, we should go, you know, the ham radio solution.
Oh, we should go back to running our own lists.
But a lot of people don't want that needless pain of keeping track of it, which is why I say that there is a business model there that is somebody who runs that who takes the headache out.
It's just that their mission is, you know, my name's Steve.
I got Bill and William to give me $400 million.
I just bought a really nice office with a bunch of servers.
And I'm going to host your stuff.
And that's it.
Not I'm going to be here for you.
I've talked to these groups.
We're going to have a plan.
You know, nothing like that.
Just I'm going to do this and then eventually maybe somebody will buy me.
And now we will.
We have been.
We are.
And we will continue to pay a price for that.
And a lot of people come to me unaware that the central core archive of their subculture or their childhood or their knowledge was somebody's forgotten tab in a weird business model somewhere in Silicon Valley.
Well, Jason, we're down to our last minute.
Is there anything people can do to help or to get more involved or to learn more about this in the few days that are ahead?
So Yahoo Groups, double check your spam filter to make sure that it hasn't been sent to you.
Look for the word Yahoo Groups.
Just make sure that you're not the administrator of a group you forgot about, which you are totally allowed to forget about because it was 15 years ago.
We have a website, ArchiveTeam.org.
We're always working to try to save cultural history that's in digital format.
And there's more of it every single day.
The work you do is simply unparalleled.
And I hope that you're able to save so much more and that you're not met with these unreasonable challenges because what you're doing is certainly a public service to the entire Internet community, if not mankind.
As are you, Emanuel.
Well, thank you.
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