WBAI New York.
The previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff, which is heard right after
the WBAI Evening News, Wednesdays at 6.30 p.m.
Stay tuned for Off the Hook.
It is 7 p.m.
Stay tuned.
And it is 7 o'clock.
You are listening to radio station WBAI New York.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook once again, coming to you on a Wednesday evening.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
I'm joined tonight by Kyle.
You're messing with the phone there.
Is everything okay?
I'm using, yes, a modular jack.
Got a landline there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good for you.
No, I know how it works, too.
In this day and age, boy, the horror stories I could tell you about what I'm hearing with
landlines, but we'll get into that in just a little bit.
Also joining us tonight, if I'm not mistaken, is Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And Gila.
Greetings and salutations.
And Alex.
Good evening from Pennsylvania.
Where apparently there's a delay.
Okay, well, we're all here, we all made it through the storm.
Okay, everything is calm, I guess, right?
Well, it was a bit much.
I mean, we got about 16 to 18 inches up here.
I feel like I literally shoveled about four tons of snow.
I was reminded of that song, you load 16 tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt, right?
You know, remember that song?
No, but I'm sorry to hear about that.
Anything we can do to help?
It was pretty intense.
I mean, it just felt like I was constantly shoveling snow in order to get out, in order
to get it off the deck, everywhere.
It was massive up here.
I'm still angry about missing the conjunction.
Three days of cloudy weather and it's gone.
And the next one will be in 2080, I believe.
And it won't be as good as this one.
You know, you'll have another chance to get home then.
Yeah, unless something else happens.
I've been thinking about this supernova will be okay, that'd be acceptable.
There's a supernova in the sky and there's so many stars.
That's certainly a possibility that would make me feel better.
Or some kind of extraterrestrial visit would be nice as well, would make up for this missing
once in a 10 lifetime event.
I'm surprised that we haven't heard of, or maybe I just missed, any news about a cult
type of activity that was occasioned by this alignment.
Remember what happened with Comet Hale-Bopp?
Yeah, but you see the thing, Alex, the reason why you're not hearing about cult behavior
is because we're in a cult right now.
We're kind of within the whole Trump cult society.
So you don't really hear about competing cults as much as you would have in the past.
Yeah, we're captive to the dominant cult.
Yeah, yeah, that's some kind of biological reason for that.
I mean, that makes sense, right?
I mean, you get this sort of, we're in our own cultish echo chamber in a sense, I guess.
Let me remind people we are doing this radio show, as we have done in the past
couple of weeks.
We will be doing Off the Hook Overtime at 8 p.m. on our Channel 2600 YouTube channel.
So join us there.
You can call us.
You can call us.
I'll give you the phone number now, but it's not going to do anything.
You'll just get a meaningless recording if you call it now, but at 8 o'clock you can
call it and speak to us live.
It's 802-321-HACK.
It's 802-321-4225.
It's Vermont area code, but it's not actually in Vermont because phone numbers aren't geographical
anymore.
If you have the kind of billing agreement with a phone company where you actually have
to pay long distance to call because the number says 802 instead of, say, 212, well, we'd
like to hear about that, and if you could spare the change to call us later and tell
us about that, we'd sure like to hear that story.
But again, 802-321-4225 at 8 o'clock, Channel 2600 on YouTube.
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I'm going to want to talk about the whole SolarWinds fiasco that has been going on,
and boy, this is an incredible story.
It's an incredible story of hacking and insecurity and other things.
Before we do, though, a couple of other things I'd like to get into.
I know, Rob, you found a very interesting story concerning the COVID-19 relief package,
which we're hearing so much about now.
Is it happening?
Is it not happening?
Are we going to get all $600 at once?
We're going to have to spend it a dollar a day.
Is it going to be $2,000 now?
All kinds of disagreements, but inside that agreement that was finally hammered out is
at least one major surprise.
Do you want to shock our listeners with that?
Yeah.
There are a couple of surprises in this particular Christmas present manual.
The bill, there are so many different things that have nothing to do with COVID or stimulus
or any sort of relief payments in this bill because that's how things are done now.
You can't get anything done unless you attach a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with
it to grease the pipes.
In this particular package, the spending bill that's been on everyone's mind, there
are a couple of things.
For one thing, there's a copyright proposal that makes it a felony to stream copyrighted
content you do not own for financial gain.
That's a big deal.
The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020, and that will allow law enforcement to prosecute
pirate streaming services, quote unquote.
They are saying, and they are coming out in front of it and saying that they don't want
to go after your average internet user with this.
They want to specifically go after companies and entities that are basically promoting
piracy for profit, for financial gain.
Let me see if I understand this correctly.
If I were to say, go down to the filing office and start a company, and then the next day,
because I probably wouldn't have time that same day to do it, but the next day, I actually
start streaming episodes of Seinfeld and start charging, oh, I don't know, what do you think,
$1.25 per episode?
Is that fair?
Thirty-nine cents.
All right.
A promotional deal, 39 cents for the first five episodes, would you think?
Okay, and then $1.25 because I think that's really what the market will bear.
You're saying, Rob, that that makes me a felon?
That kind of criminal mischief makes me, and that's part of COVID-19 relief?
Absolutely.
Up until this, that sort of activity would have been classed a misdemeanor.
They wouldn't have liked that you're doing it, but you would not have been a felon.
You would not have been prosecutable at major levels by the feds.
This bill makes it unlawful to provide a service that's primarily designed to show copyright
infringing content, has no significant commercial purpose other than piracy, or is intentionally
marketed to promote streaming piracy, which is an interesting set of words.
It's the sort of thing that I can see the powers that be getting all sorts of fun, lawyer-y
meanings out of.
What I don't understand is there has been so little time where members of Congress have
actually been doing anything.
When did they find time to get this all written up and inserted into this emergency relief
program?
Did anybody even hear them talking about this?
I don't know.
You'd have to ask Senator Tom Tillis from North Carolina, who apparently is the force
behind this particular chunk.
Tom Tillis.
Okay, hold on.
I'm on it.
All right.
Excuse me.
Is it possible to find out what any one entity stands to gain?
Who's protected by this?
Where do these penalties go?
Do we know any more about the repercussions?
The thing that I'm seeing, looking at this article, is that this is functionally, and
correct me if I'm wrong, anybody, but this appears to be kind of a SOPA, PIPA, light
type situation.
This is a weird way to get that wedge, not a weird way, this is a way to get that sort
of wedge foot in the door, and then it wouldn't surprise me if they tried to expand this
to the broader scope of what SOPA and PIPA were trying to do, but yeah, SOPA, PIPA, light,
I suppose.
Okay, I got it.
Senator Tom Tillis, he's got offices in Charlotte, Greenville, Hendersonville, High Point, and
Raleigh, as well as Washington, D.C.
Which do you want the phone number for?
All of them?
Take them all.
I'm not going to give you all the phone numbers.
Come on, we only have-
Raleigh.
Raleigh?
All right.
The one that's 202.
Well, okay, I'll give you the 202 as well, but Raleigh, 919-856-4630, or drop by 310
New Bern Avenue, Suite 122, Washington, D.C., phone number 202-224-6342.
If you're sending a fax, 202-228-2563.
There, that's how you contact your elected officials.
What in God's name are you thinking?
Streaming, that's a priority with COVID-19 relief?
And I'm sure that's not the only thing that's in there.
There's probably all kinds of other-
There is one other particular thing in this package that is of note.
It is called the CASE Act, C-A-S-E, short for Copyright Alternative in Small Claims
Enforcement.
And what that does is it establishes a copyright claim tribunal within the United States Copyright
Office.
It's a federal court, so it doesn't- In theory, you won't have the costs associated with bringing
a literal federal case to enforce your copyrights.
But this is going to be some kind of smaller panel, smaller tribunal within the Copyright
Office itself to provide an option to resolve copyright disputes outside the federal courts,
which it seems to aim to make it easier for smaller creators to address their copyright
infringements without the whole hullabaloo of a federal case.
But the fear around this seems to be- One of the fears around this seems to be that
this will trigger an avalanche of claims because people can troll with this.
It would basically be an open invite to let copyright trolls file cases cheaply against
whoever they want for whatever they want.
I was just going to suggest, could I, as a content creator, upload something to a really,
really large, homogenous, dominant platform and then seek some sort of restitution for
their profiteering off of my content?
No, I know that wouldn't work, but I'm just putting it out there.
It just seems like it's really- It's a backwards form of protection.
Alex, do you have something to contribute to this as a lawyer?
Yeah.
I think there's a lot of issues with this, and on both sides too.
I think the fact that it establishes this streamlined way to adjudicate copyright claims,
I don't think is in and of itself a horrible thing because copyright claims are- There's
a lot of them all the time.
There's too many to be asserted by individuals in federal court, and so having a streamlined
process for it is in and of itself, I think, a terrible thing, but it will very likely
be wielded against internet users in an unfair way.
On the other hand, there is a way, essentially, to opt out of this process, but you have to
do it, I believe, in a very specific time period, otherwise your rights are adjudicated
with respect to that particular copyright.
On the other hand, I could see this being kind of interesting from a revenge porn perspective
because using copyright law has been one way, and asserting copyright over your own images
in a revenge porn situation has been one way to allow the courts to provide you a legal
remedy, let's say, to reclaim those images, to shut them down, and to go after the offenders
in a revenge porn situation.
This might give revenge porn victims a streamlined way to assert rights to their own images and
get them taken down.
Now, maybe, but we don't know.
We don't know how this is going to work out in practice, and it does seem like it will
certainly benefit larger corporations as opposed to ordinary internet users.
It seems like this is just inviting that sort of thing because we already see now with the
copyright system and the laws and the processes being what they are now, copyright claims
are roundly misused just as a trolling tool, a harassment tool.
There are cases of people using the copyright claim system on YouTube to take down unfavorable
reviews of their own movies or work or whatever, and it just seems like making it easier to
misuse the system as a harassment tool is not doing anyone any favors.
Well, in normal federal court, we have something called a slap suit.
If somebody sues you for something frivolous, let's say asserting a claim of misuse of a
trademark when it's obviously fair use and the claim itself is designed essentially to
try to bankrupt you, waste your money, and shut you down for whatever reason.
These slap suits, the slap, S-L-A-P-P, stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
Now I think what could be interesting with the CASE Act is if there were some legal mechanism
or some remedy that was equivalent to the remedy that is involved with a slap suit for
over-asserting your rights to a copyright or going after people without any justification
using the streamlined adjudicative process to do that.
I think that would be a very interesting and innovative way to balance the rights of artists,
corporations, et cetera, when it comes to copyright and the rights of internet users
to use those copyrighted materials, especially in the context of fair use.
All right.
Well, we have to move on.
I would like to read a couple of letters that we've gotten.
We've been getting a lot of mail lately, which is great.
It's good to see people writing.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
Any comments on the show?
Any comments on technology, hacking in general?
Please write to us.
Here's a letter that we got last week.
I've been a fan of the show for many years, but my interest has been reignited lately,
and I wanted to say thanks for providing an entertaining, thought-provoking program during
such bleak times.
I had a few quick thoughts about some topics.
The BBS tapes have been a fascinating story.
The history, what it took to get them into a functioning, good-sounding state, and the
actual calls on the tapes themselves.
In fact, we're going to play one or two in a minute.
I'm looking forward to hearing more calls on the show, checking them out whenever you
release them.
I've been showing over how they could be used in some sort of art slash multimedia project,
but I haven't come up with anything just yet.
And actually, a lot of people are thinking of creative ways that we can do something
fun with all these bits of history from, I think, around the mid-90s is about where
they average.
Some of them might be a few years after that.
Some of them might be a few years before that.
But what do we do with all these recordings?
Well, the ones that are meant to be public, obviously, they can be public.
The ones that were private, it's a little bit unclear.
And then, of course, there are all kinds of sounds and beeps and clicks and things like
that, which most people would just discard, but not us.
We find interest in all of those things because it's switching systems from mechanical era
and all kinds of bygone technologies that we are always fascinated to study.
Number two, I've also been enjoying the After Hours segment.
It was called Overtime, but After Hours is another good word for it, I guess, which you've
been streaming on YouTube.
I've always wished that the show was longer than one hour, and now it is, or sort of anyway.
During last week's episode, Emmanuel mentioned an issue where messages to Gmail users were
resulting in an error saying something like, the Gmail user does not exist.
Well, actually, it was just to me that I noticed that, and I noticed it one time.
I was forwarding a message to myself, and it told me that I didn't exist.
I cut and pasted it.
So every time you do something involving Google, there's a line of people standing up to defend
them.
So if Google said that you don't exist, well, you must have done something wrong.
What I would have been accused of doing wrong was typing my own name wrong.
So I cut and pasted it so that I could prove that I didn't do that, and it worked the second
time.
So therefore, aha, I got you, Google.
You said I didn't exist when I did.
So that was my triumph for last week.
Anyway, I received an email about this issue from my email provider, ProtonMail.
It appears there was a widespread issue.
They also covered the issue pretty extensively, and I don't know whether or not this was related
to the outage that Google had earlier that same week or going out on a limb, whether
it could potentially be related to the SolarWinds attack.
Well, I don't think it was really related to either one of those.
First of all, if you have an outage, then you basically get a message saying that the
service doesn't exist, not that the user on the service doesn't exist.
For that kind of an outage to happen, Gmail itself would have had to have been somehow
compromised, and while Gmail remained up, its user database disappeared.
I don't think that is part of the outage that affected Google last week.
I think it was simply an outage.
You couldn't reach Google, and you got a timeout message of one sort or another.
So I haven't gotten any kind of explanation.
I've gotten a lot of people saying, oh, Google didn't do anything wrong, but something happened.
Something happened.
It's happened before, too.
Many times, I've forwarded mail to a Gmail box, and it's just disappeared someplace.
Oddly enough, I can find it when I search for it, but it doesn't show up in any of the
mailboxes, whether it's direct, promotions, social media, spam.
So occasionally, something just goes a little nuts, and it's okay.
That's part of the internet.
That's part of technology.
It's important to be able to admit when something isn't quite working right, and not just always
point the finger and say, well, you must have done something wrong.
Also, on last week's episode, there was talk about the presidential alert system party
that took place back in 2018.
Oh, yes.
It was good times.
I attended that party.
It was a lot of fun to get together, see how the alert behaved or didn't on the wide array
of phones that people brought to the event.
It was downstairs, back when we used to go into the radio station.
And we have a cafe down there.
Do we still have a cafe down there?
Does anybody know?
Someone should check.
Commons Cafe.
Are you there, guys?
Really hope you're doing okay, and look forward to seeing you again.
But we gathered a whole bunch of people there, and everybody brought their cell phones.
We lined them up on a table, and this was in the afternoon.
It was the first and only test of the presidential alert system, and we waited to see what would
happen.
Of course, all these phones started going off with all kinds of emergency alert tones,
and we recorded the whole thing and broadcast part of it.
It was a lot of fun.
That's what hackers do.
Anyway, from what I recall, there was media present during the event, but I never saw
it covered anywhere.
Do you all know if anyone ever printed, aired, digitally published any stories about it?
It would be fun to go back and revisit them.
Does anybody remember?
Was there any media?
I know there was some kind of media there, but I don't remember if anybody actually did
a story on it.
Apart from us, you mean?
Apart from us, yeah.
We do count, but there might have been a story on New York 1 or something, or they might
have just had a moment of us and other moments of other people, because we weren't the only
ones who were noticing this.
Yes, Alex?
I think it was on New York 1, and maybe another local station, too.
It might have been WPIX.
Was that 11?
Channel 11?
I think.
I can't remember.
You can't remember if WPIX is Channel 11, and you grew up in New York?
I think it is, isn't it?
You think it is.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, it's been a long time.
Yeah, but it's been on the air every single day since the 1940s.
Do you remember the cop who used to do the kiddie programs in the afternoon?
Maybe that's before your time.
Rob, you would know this.
Yes, indeed.
I don't know what his name was, but he used to introduce all the children's programming.
I think it was The Three Stooges, one of the shows.
It's a part of New York, growing up in New York, is Channel 11, WPIX.
It was a cop who...
That was back when you had announcers on television, not just audio announcers,
but sometimes video announcers would come out and say, okay, kiddies, here's the next program.
I remember Jeannie Moose was interested.
Jeannie Moose?
She's on CNN.
Yeah.
What does she have to do with this?
In the presidential alert thing that we did.
Oh, I forgot about that.
Yeah, the presidential alert.
Let's get back to the story we're talking about.
She was interested in it as well, but I don't know if she did a story on us.
I saw the flyer that we made.
It's right around the corner.
Let's finish this letter.
Anyways, thanks for all that you do.
I look forward to what you have in store for 2021.
We plan on staying on topic more.
We're going to try that.
Something different.
All that you have planned for on the air, the magazine, hopefully in-person events.
Thank you, PRD, for that wonderful letter.
You reminded us of the BBS tapes that we have, that we're restoring.
We've restored, but now we're going through them all.
Let's see what we have to share with people from around 1995.
Yo, this is Dragon of 206.
I was looking at the new US West telephones that are in Washington, and they seem to be
Redbox proof because they've got calling card slots and stuff, and this little high-tech
feel to it, and a little screen and everything.
I tried using a Redbox, but it didn't seem to be working.
That's it.
That's it.
Did you know that 206, that's your area code, Kyle, Dragon?
It is.
Do you know Dragon?
No, not personally.
Did you know of Dragon?
Oh, I think everybody knows of Dragon.
There's a Dragon in every area code I know, but that was 206 Dragon.
We're not trying to mock you, Dragon, if you're out there listening.
We're just having fun listening to our old tapes from way back.
I know some of those US West employees that worked on the telephone system were definitely
chasing people that were making use of Redboxes on the system.
From my work at the Communications Museum, I've heard a lot of stories about what that was like.
Well, there were a lot of people using Redboxes back then, and for those who don't know,
Redboxes were basically any device that you would hold up to a payphone and have it beep
five times, and basically that's all you needed to do to tell the phone that you put a quarter in.
With a system that simple, everybody in the world was using it,
and the phone companies had to redesign payphones and eventually get rid of them.
Yeah, it was a big deal.
So there was a lot of energy put into getting the out-of-band signaling established.
Yes, Alex?
With respect to Dragon's comment there, he was complaining about
it sounds like the voice path of the US West telephones was probably disabled to discourage
Redboxing, but I believe there was a way to get around that.
If I recall correctly, Mr. Firefly might remember this better than I do, but I think
at the time when payphones had their voice path disabled, you could re-enable the voice path
by dialing 1-800-288-2880, which was 1-800-ATT-ATT0 for the operator.
That would then obviously allow you to talk to the operator.
You would ask them to place a long-distance call for you,
and then they would ask you to put the money in.
You had to be more careful about it because you were doing your five beeps while an operator
was listening.
That's almost good enough to fool the phone.
That's almost good enough, Alex.
I did this a lot when I was younger.
This is all the product of a misspent youth, hanging out with you guys, quite frankly.
But then you just had to be very careful about it because there was an operator listening
while you were Redboxing, so you couldn't put the coins in too quickly, if I recall.
Do you remember that, Rob?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That's an actual Redbox you got there.
Where did you get your hands on one of those, Rob?
Well, nowadays, everything's an app.
This is just an app on my smartphone.
But yeah, there is a Redbox app, which is very nice and would have been nice to have
back then.
It would have been nice to have that night we did the show from the payphone.
Yes.
Instead of having that club of quarters.
We did.
But the fun thing about this, too, I mean, it might have been just the voice path.
Being disabled, which was happening, but also the caller mentioned that there was a calling
card acceptor on the phone, which leads ones to believe that this was probably one of the
earlier phones that had the control circuitry in itself.
It wasn't just a terminal for the phone system.
It was actually doing some of the hard work on its own and had some kind of processor
type capability in the phone, which might have been controlling things then.
So getting past the voice path might not have worked on this particular phone, I'm
sorry to say, 30 odd years later.
Yeah, it may have been just more of a priority to switch completely over to different payment
methods and kind of move beyond that system entirely for overhead and other reasons, collection
of coins and that sort of logistical aspect.
You know what a pain in the ass it was to collect coins?
Because they are heavy and they're not that valuable for the amount of space they take
up.
If you would see a step vans with a phone company logos on them, that's what they were
for, to carry the immense amount of coins that were basically collected from all the
pay phones around cities.
They don't do that anymore.
And I like to think that the red boxers of the world saved them a lot of trouble by simply
bypassing the quarter part of the whole thing.
Rob, can I ask you, does that app of yours, can it do a dime?
That app can do a dime.
This is, there's a dime for you.
You notice that-
There's an extra nickel just because I like you.
Okay, so if you do the dime and then you do the quarter, you'll notice the timing is a
little bit different.
Can you do a dime followed by a quarter?
Yeah, much quicker.
That's 35 cents there, folks.
If I remember off the top of my head, the pulses in the quarter were 33 milliseconds
versus 66 for the nickel and dime.
You have a good memory.
Okay, so let's listen to one more recording from the 90s and then we will get into our
main story of the day.
This is the Interceptor in 423.
It's Wednesday, October the 9th.
Wow, there's so many messages.
Oh, help.
Jacko, I appreciate it.
If everybody shared your attitude, a lot more could be accomplished on the board.
And everybody wants to get on and trash the newcomers.
But if you think back to when you started, unless you were conceived super elite, you
pretty much started at the bottom also and had to ask the same questions because that's
what it's about, asking questions, gaining knowledge, and sharing what you know with
everybody else.
But somebody said I didn't know anything, so that was just talking out my ass.
But Jacko, I don't know much about the Juno system.
I'll check and see if I can find anybody that knows anything.
And if I can get anything useful on that for you, I'll post it here.
Looking for something to leave.
I don't want to get on here and not leave anything.
I can't find anything useful.
This is the Interceptor, 423.
See ya.
Thank you very much, Interceptor.
You know, I guess we can figure out what year that was, Wednesday, October 9th, whatever
year had that in the mid-90s, that's what year that was.
But again, more talk about Juno.
In fact, we got a lot of mail from people.
We got some mail from people using Juno somehow.
I thought Juno went out of business, but people are still using Juno.
So a lot of memories, a lot of history there.
Absolutely.
And it's a lot of fun, too, to just listen to that hacker attitude of like, yeah, share
your information.
That's what it's all about.
I remember that whole divide between people who thought they were too cool for school
and leet, and like, you're not allowed to hang out with me if you're not leet enough.
And everyone was a beginner at some point, and everyone started somewhere.
And that's the right attitude.
Very true.
Very true.
OK, so getting into the story everybody is talking about, that, of course, is the Solar
Winds hack.
Oh, my God.
It's something that is affecting thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, if not many,
many more than that.
Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, Belkin, VMware, they've all had their computers on their networks
infected with the malware.
And of course, there could be far, far more.
Solar Winds had stated that fewer than 18,000 companies were impacted, as if that number
is supposed to somehow be reassuring.
Fewer than 18,000.
OK.
Even attempted to hide the list of clients who use the infected software.
Well, more recent news that takes some of Solar Winds' big-name clients from possibly
affected to confirmed affected.
This is from a story at The Verge.
At the moment, the big tech companies have the same story, boiling down to, we're investigating,
but we don't think this has impacted us.
But as has been repeatedly reported, and similar to the 2016 hack of the DNC's emails, it can
take a long time for the impacts of a hack to be fully realized.
And once hackers are inside a system, it can also be very difficult to tell if they're
fully gone.
Exacerbating the issue is the fact that investigators found another hacking group that had broken
into Solar Winds using a similar exploit.
This attack, dubbed Supernova, was at first thought to be part of the main attack, but
investigators now think it was executed by a second, less sophisticated group.
There are all kinds of reasons why a hacking group might want to get into a big tech company's
systems, including access to future product plans or employee and customer information
that could be sold or held for ransom, assuming they actually went looking for that info.
But it's also possible these companies were only collateral damage as these hacking groups
went after governmental agencies, ones that happen to share the same Solar Winds-provided
IT management systems.
Now, at the moment, it doesn't seem like any of these companies are particularly worried.
Compare that to the U.S.
government's computer security organization, which announced that every federal agency
should power down its Solar Winds systems immediately.
Now, Solar Winds is a technology company whose products are used by a number of federal civilian
agencies for network management.
The U.S.
government often contracts with private companies like this because their expertise in product
development is far beyond what the government can develop on its own.
Now, some members of Congress have consistently criticized the potential security risks of
using this kind of software, particularly without a thorough security review first.
But protecting these networks is also the responsibility of the government.
And we're already seeing lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, say there
needs to be an in-depth review of software security practices.
And of course, this is going to be a big challenge for Biden.
Foreign adversaries are consistently attempting to infiltrate U.S.
networks and are only becoming more sophisticated in their ability to do so.
Alex, any thoughts on this?
Oh, I've got a lot of thoughts on this.
And, you know, I think it's quite interesting, too, because we dove into this, I think, head
first last week and mentioned a lot of minutiae in the details.
Certain things like the very weak password that was used to secure the update server.
And these are things that have created or gained a lot of momentum over the past week
and really snowballed the discussion, I think, on solar winds.
You know, and I love Senator Wyden as much as anybody else.
And in fact, you know, he's married to Nancy Bass Wyden, by the way, who for our listeners
may recall is the owner of the Strand Bookstore here in New York.
And I think Senator Wyden is generally right on when it comes to privacy issues, especially
use of geolocation data and really protecting people's privacy.
But I will say I do not entirely agree with his assessment and his colleague's assessment of
this failure to review third party software in the federal government.
This particular type of attack was essentially undetectable from any kind of risk mitigation
standpoint because the updates themselves came from the actual infrastructure build
server of SolarWinds.
So for all intents and purposes, those updates that were being pushed out to these 18,000
customers that you had mentioned looked like legitimate updates.
And the right thing to do is to update your software when there is an update to be had.
This is what we're all told to do.
And it's what you should do.
So everybody was doing what they should have been doing.
And this breach still occurred.
And I think that, yeah, there is a bigger issue with third party risk and software needing
to be coded securely from the outset, right?
This whole privacy and security by design DevSecOps endeavor that companies have right
now.
But this would have been an incredibly difficult breach to have avoided because of the nature
of the way in which it was affected.
It was done extraordinarily well.
There was a lot of great tradecraft that was implemented.
And I think this gets to a larger issue here, which is ordinarily, we probably wouldn't
even hear of something like this.
And that's because a company that does incident response is obviously well known for its cyber
security related threat intelligence, FireEye, was the one researching its own breach and
found this particular attack vector, having reported on it, sent out the IOCs, the indicators
of compromise.
And we all realized, oh, my God, this is a much wider breach than anybody had anticipated.
So if it wasn't for FireEye, this entire operation probably would have gone on undetected
for God knows how long.
And even if it was detected in the federal government, because if you look at these targets,
they're targeting treasury.
They're targeting energy.
They were apparently, the threat actors behind it, ostensibly Russia, were monitoring the
email accounts of top ranking US treasury officials.
That's espionage.
That's intelligence collection.
This is the kind of stuff that when it happens, and if there was a breach, we probably wouldn't
know about it because it would be classified.
So because this breach occurred and was investigated by a private sector company who then released
the information, I think we're only hearing about this now.
My concern is that there are far more of these types of events that we do not learn
about because they are classified.
And perhaps there isn't enough information sharing that comes from the government and
especially the intelligence community back to the private sector.
Obviously, groups like CISA, where Brian Krebs was the head of CISA, who was recently fired.
Christopher Krebs.
Krebs, sorry.
That's the other Krebs.
Yeah, Brian Krebs is a journalist.
There are still different types of Krebs in cybersecurity these days.
But yeah, Chris Krebs was the fired head of CISA, essentially fired for doing his job
and not towing the administration's line.
I think there's a lot of great strides being made in terms of public and private intelligence
sharing.
But for something like this, I really wonder, if it wasn't for FireEye, how much information
would the public actually have known by this?
Well, it's interesting because from what I'm seeing here, SolarWinds was not used on
networks that carry classified data, only on networks carrying unclassified data.
Energy Department on Friday clarified earlier reports to stress the hackers only access
business networks and it has not impacted the mission essential national security functions
of the department, including the National Nuclear Security Administration.
One insider confirmed the nuclear weapons networks are separate from those front facing
business operations networks, saying there's no need for anyone to have their hair on fire.
That is a quote.
And that is the smart way of doing it, obviously.
But as one former top congressional intelligence staffer, Andy Kaiser, said,
highly skilled hackers can sometimes turn a foothold on one network into a jumping off
point to penetrate another.
Even if the two networks are physically separated by what's known as an air gap, once embedded
in an unclassified network, Kaiser agreed, or said rather, advanced persistent threat
actors could potentially move into more sensitive networks or gain access credentials to classified
networks, particularly when given months or years.
And by all accounts, that's exactly how long these people have been in the system.
Alex.
Yeah, and going back, if you look at some of the timelines that various security related
companies have put out, I mean, this last week, we knew that this may have started in
October of 2019.
Now it's going back further to August of 2019.
And I have to say, I have with our DNS intelligence platform that I created over the last several
years, I investigated some of the domains that were at issue and did find very similar
domain names to the very famous one that was being used with the SolarWinds, the AVSSV
cloud.com domain that was used in most of the SolarWinds attacks.
We found several other similar domains that go back.
One actually had a direct nexus back to Russia as well.
And I would invite people who are interested in that, we're happy to share this information
with them as a potential IOC or indicator of compromise.
And I invite anybody to contact me about that.
In the hacker spirit, we're willing to share that information.
But the companies that you mentioned, Emmanuel, in particular, Cisco, Belkin, and VMware,
I mean, this goes right to the point that you were just making, which is they may have
used the access that they had with some companies to jump over, obviously, into these companies,
into Cisco, Belkin, VMware.
They developed Cisco and Belkin networking hardware and software as well.
And so if they were able to establish a foothold, let's say, in Cisco or Belkin, that may
compromise the trust that we have in everything from enterprise networking equipment, enterprise
level routers, to home networking equipment, stuff that's sort of commercial, off-the-shelf
things that you would buy at Best Buy, your Belkin routers.
And when everybody's working from home these days because of the global health crisis in
which we find ourselves, that becomes a major, major problem.
And the same thing with VMware.
VMware is virtual machineware, very, very commonly used, again, probably almost more
commonly than SolarWinds is found in large enterprises.
VMware is used all over the world.
If they were able to compromise the build infrastructure, and I don't think there's
any indication that they have yet, but assuming hypothetically they're able to compromise
the build infrastructure of VMware, and push out a similar attack by way of a software
update, that would, again, be absolutely massive.
And it becomes very difficult to root these guys out of your networks because their TTPs,
their tactics, techniques, and procedures were apparently to use the access that SolarWinds
Orion had to certain boxes to create additional privileged accounts.
And when they have those additional privileged accounts, then they would go after the certificate
signing token for SAML, or the security assertion markup language, which is used essentially
to transfer identity-related tokens from one place to another.
And when they were able to essentially issue their own tokens, which were signed by the
right certificate, they could then get access to cloud services of these enterprise customers,
cloud services of these major organizations, or the Department of Treasury, governmental
organizations.
So I think it's going to take a very, very long time to unwind exactly what the extent
of these types of breaches were.
And given the level of sophisticated tradecraft and the nature of these breaches and how they
piggybacked, essentially, like we said last week, it's like they were underneath a bus
that was going into a secure compound.
I think it's going to be very difficult to unwind these breaches, because the threat
actors themselves may have engaged in a good amount of anti-forensic behavior.
They may have been very adept at covering up their tracks.
They absolutely did.
Some of the stuff I read was the ability for some of the software to detect, based on network
connectivity, if it could reach certain IPs, it would say, OK, I'm in a sandbox where
potentially someone's looking at exactly what I'm doing in a diagnostic way, and that
then ran some part of that software that protected it from further evaluation.
Well, I think what you're outlining, Alex, underscores the significance of this, because
SolarWinds is just so all-encompassing.
Everybody uses them.
They're the solution everyone turns to, and that is the weakness, because so many just
turn all their problems over to SolarWinds, and then when there's a big problem with SolarWinds,
everybody has the same big problem.
That is the security hole right there.
What we're seeing now is the result of just relying on this company to take care of all
the security issues and assume that it's not going to come back and bite you in the end.
Now that it has, though, and now that it does appear that Russia is behind it, even though
Trump refuses to admit that, and I can't say I'm surprised that he's not seeing it, what's
the reaction?
Alex, do you consider this to be an act of war, as some are saying?
No, I absolutely do not.
I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah, we haven't seen any type of kinetic effect on the population here.
They haven't used this to take down hospital systems.
I think what we're seeing here is a rare glimpse into the tradecraft of a very sophisticated
nation targeting the United States, and I think that the United States very likely,
I'm not saying I have any direct knowledge of this, but look, we're a sophisticated country.
We probably do very similar things to other countries, and again, this is not the same,
this is not the first time an attack like this has happened.
We obliquely hinted at this, and I looked this up after our discussion last week, but
there was an attack, very similar, that happened in Ukraine.
I think it was in 2017, and it was a very prominent accounting software that was used
in Ukraine.
Again, the build infrastructure of that accounting software was compromised, and a malicious
update was pushed out to all of these accounting firms, and it was ostensibly the Russians
that performed this type of tradecraft, again, several years ago.
So I think we're seeing some similar TTPs here, but it's a great attack vector, because
you are hiding essentially right in plain sight, and you're exactly right, Emmanuel,
I think precisely right, that because everybody relies on this, this is the lowest common
denominator of something that is found in all these major enterprises as well as the
federal government.
So if you get access to that, you've got the keys not only to the kingdom, but to the
universe.
Yeah, and what we're seeing here, I think it's a form of espionage.
It's a very sophisticated form of espionage, and that's how some security experts are
viewing it.
The Australian-based legal expert, Cassandra Steer, says hacking like this, especially
to this extent, might go beyond espionage, but we don't really have anything to say
it's unlawful under international law.
And as you said, Alex, let's be clear, the US has engaged in similar activity, just
never to this extent.
But I have to say, Stuxnet was definitely something that was malicious and caused all
kinds of damage.
And when you do that, when you cause damage, or you mentioned hospitals, when you do
something that actually hurts people, that's where the crime is.
But this, invading systems and basically showing the weaknesses, not because you're
trying to unveil them, but you actually have some kind of modus operandi, that is part
of the game.
That's part of the game you're playing.
And to call this an act of war, I think, is highly irresponsible, because it's not.
It's a disservice to people who have fought in actual wars.
So let's be careful with the rhetoric here.
But isn't it an escalation in tactics?
I mean, doesn't this make it fair game to do this right back and at the same, or let's
just think American, more of it at this scale?
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that other countries are doing the same thing and that other countries
are trying to do the same thing.
But it's a different type of battlefield, if you want to even carry that analogy.
Rob, go ahead.
This is also, I think, a great example of how irresponsibly we've handled the gift of
the internet, when it was put together, when it has its origins in government projects
to create a decentralized networking system, something without the single points of failure,
something that if one chunk goes down, the rest take over for it, and everything just
keeps working.
But we're now at a point, 30, 40 years later, where we have allowed commercial interests
to monopolize such huge swaths of the technical environment.
How much of the internet now goes through Amazon Cloud hosting, for example, or Google
or anything like that?
And how many all use the same equipment?
I mean, that rogue's gallery, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, Belkin, VMware, if you're sitting
in front of a computer that is attached to the internet, you're probably using at least
two or three of those companies' products.
Right, and their-
That just leads-
Their security problem becomes your security problem, no matter how good your security
is.
Absolutely, and everyone suffers as a result.
Now, here's the most stunning thing about this, according to this story in Slate.
Basically, at least six federal agencies, including the State Department, Homeland
Security, National Nuclear Security Administration, all affected by this.
The most stunning thing is not how sophisticated the attack was, it's that this has been known
for so long.
As far back as 1997, a presidential commission concluded that the information networks controlling
much of our economy and society were vulnerable to cyber attacks.
The ability of foreign powers to launch these hacks and do us harm, the report went on,
is real.
It is growing at an alarming rate, and we have little defense against it.
Now, basically, a year before that report, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board released
a report on information warfare defense, warning that our increasing dependency on vulnerable
networks amounted to a recipe for a national security disaster.
I think that's where we are right now.
Its authors recommended more than 50 actions to be taken over the next five years at a
cost of $3 billion.
None of the actions was taken.
Now, these reports are only repeating a document signed all the way back in 1984 by President
Ronald Reagan called National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information System Security,
which concluded that new computer networks, which were just hitting the market, were highly
susceptible to interception, unauthorized electronic access, and related forms of technical
exploitation by foreign spies, terrorist groups, and criminal elements.
That study was prompted by the movie War Games.
War Games, yes, about a high-tech whiz teenager who unwittingly hacks into the North American
Air Defense Command's early warning computers, nearly sets off a nuclear war.
After Reagan saw the movie, he asked his top general, could something like this really
happen?
I'm not going to do the voice.
So basically, we're looking at lessons that just have not been learned over the decades.
Now, security is a lot better than it used to be, but vast networks have been left exposed
in one way or another, and dedicated hackers who very much want to get inside these networks
and have the resources of a nation state will figure out a way.
There was one point a little more than 20 years ago when much of this problem could
have been avoided.
Soon after that 1997 report warning of possible cyber attacks, Richard Clark, President Clinton's
counterterrorism coordinator, proposed setting mandatory cybersecurity requirements for
industries in critical infrastructure.
Economic sector is vital to the functioning of a modern society, including telecommunications,
electrical power, gas and oil, banking and finance, transportation, water supply, emergency
services.
Most of the industries were and still are private companies and their executives who
abhorred all forms of regulation, resisted the proposal.
And that's where we are now.
Yes, Alex.
Yeah, no doubt.
I mean, look, and it's obviously worse because our interdependencies have grown exponentially
since those times.
And this is a supply chain issue, as somebody mentioned on off the hook overtime last week
as well, and I think rightly so.
But it's also an issue of third party risk, and how do we mitigate that risk?
How do we put this down?
I'm sorry, I didn't look at the clock.
We're out of time.
We have to go.
Join us on Overtime Channel 2600 on YouTube.
We'll be there at 8 o'clock and give us a call 802-321-4225.
We will see you next week.
Write to us OTH at 2600 dot com.
Have a good night.
I've looked at clouds that way, but now they only block the sun.
They rain and snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way.
I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow.
It's clouds illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all.
I've looked at clouds that way, but now it's just another show.
You leave them laughing when you go, and if you care, don't let them know.
Don't give yourself away.
I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from wind and moon and still somehow.
It's clouds illusions I recall.
I really don't know clouds at all.
Tears and fears and feeling proud to say I love you right out loud.
Dreams and schemes and surface crowds.
I've looked at lies that way, but now friends are acting strange.
They shake their heads.
They say I've changed for something lost, but something's gained in living every day.
I've looked at lies from both sides now, from wind and moon and still somehow.
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.
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Be heard.
And welcome to off-the-hook overtime here with Kyle and yes Rob
Gila, yeah, they're there. Well, let them speak for themselves. Okay, and Alex as well
You all there y'all make it good. Okay. I'm really sorry about that. By the way, I
Was facing the other way
I was I was reading all this material and the time just went by and I looked and we only had 30 seconds left and I
Alex you were making a point. So do you want to finish your point while we wait for phone calls?
802 3 2 1 4 2 2 5
Yeah, sure. I mean I think
Yeah, really you just use any excuse to cut me off. I would you're right
Having your back turn not looking at the clock. Sounds like oh
We seem to have lost Alex. Okay there. Sorry about that. No, they're sorry
Yeah, I think the point I was making with respect to solar winds is that this is a this is a supply chain attack
as one of the callers from
OTH overtime mentioned last week
and it's it's an issue of third-party risk and how do we pass that risk back on because it involves a lot of trust third-party
Risk and all of the vendors that we use, you know within an enterprise are all
potential vectors of attack and
It's very very difficult to audit to supervise to even understand what the hell is going on
With respect to the software that they're putting into our networks the boxes that are replacing into our networks
And you know, there's no good way to do it. So I've been arguing
at least since
2005
when I published my law review note in the Vermont Law Review for something akin to
software manufacturer liability for negligence for glaring security holes
I think there should be some sort of standard of negligence
For security issues that arise from terribly coded software, and I'm not saying that solar winds was terribly coded it when you when you have a
State sponsored act or a nation-state some kind of APT that's funded by a country
Targeting you it's very very difficult to defend right because you know
The old platitude is the threat actors
They only have to get it right once the defenders have to get it right all of the time
And and there's such a huge attack surface to use a Corey dr. O term
There's new book is attack surface for these networks. They're sprawling networks these days. It's very very difficult to be a defender
I think it's a lot easier to be a pen tester a lot easier to be an attacker than it is to be a
Defender and I say this being a cyber security lawyer and somebody who's who's worn the CISO hat as well
Okay. First of all, let me go from there one more time because we had a couple of calls we lost
I'm not sure if that was our fault
8 0 2 3 2 1 4 2 2 5. I'd like to hear from our listeners
That's the whole point actually of doing this so we can hear from our listeners since we're not in the studio
But Alex might just ask you do you think that maybe?
Instead of having these massive companies that that
covers so many different entities would we be more secure if there were more of these companies and that they they if you
Compromised one you didn't wind up compromising quite as many
Different end users or or institutions that are using those companies
Yeah, possibly. I mean look it's an issue of market share right wherever these these boxes wherever this software has penetrated into markets and
Verticals right then. Yeah, it's more of a risk
And it's more attractive. I think to to an attacker, right? So
market share seems to be
to an extent
To an extent directly proportional to your value as a target and and that's something I think that
Let's say if I were an underwriter for cyber cyber liability insurance policies right now
I would be taking into consideration
Because you know
This is going to be a massive cyber liability issue for solar winds
And I think he also gets back to the point that I was making earlier that is very very difficult to defend
Against these types of attacks from extraordinarily sophisticated actors state-sponsored actors
And that's the very reason why in many of these cyber liability policies
There is a carve-out for being attacked by a nation-state
And essentially it's the active war
exclusion if you're being targeted by if you're an individual company and you're being targeted by a foreign country with
Sophisticated attackers is very likely that you are not going to be able to defend against an attack because they're going to be
Persistent and they're not going to give up until they find a way in and therefore
According to the insurance companies
They should not be on the hook to foot your your legal bills your forensics bills and pay for your damages
when those attacks occur
But it always always takes the first caller a little extra time to call us, please
Be that first caller 802 3 2 1 4 2 2 5 because you're the reason we're here
To take those phone calls. Go ahead Kyle. I just I think it's easier to be forgiving of the
Company in question since there is no real tangible
Impacts
Liability as you phrased it like if we were talking about massive lives loss or like tainted water supplies
I think you would have a different tone. Well, let's see. What time our caller has here. Good evening
Can you hear us? I
Don't think they can hear us
Is anyone there?
Is there somebody on the line Kyle should be okay
That doesn't sound like a caller. That sounds like feedback of one sort or another
Call the way there. I think the call dropped. Okay. All right
Um
Technical problems 8 0 2 3 2 1 4 2 2 5 is our phone number be that first caller so we can make sure everything is
Working properly getting this board
To operate is always a challenge, but we we did all right last couple of weeks
so I know there are people out there that want to ask us questions or just want to
Be a part of the the show which by the way is archived along with off the hook for each week is that we do this
but we're only going to do that for as long as
listeners want us to do it and
Being part of the the show is a part of the broadcast 8 0 2 3 2 1 4 2 2 5
I'm afraid to touch that one wire that we had trouble with because if if I touch it
I feel like I'll make it worse. All right. Well, here's a call. Ah
There and they're right there
What is a recording calling we need to press one to take the call wait
I'm not doing that until I really hear the scoop. Just pick up the phone and press one. What's what's the worst that can happen?
There. All right, we pressed one. We took the bait. Yeah. Okay. Who's this?
You see Kyle you see pressing one sometimes is the right thing to do I was afraid to even do that
So I think let me ask some questions here. I want to get to the bottom of this
Helen are you there?
What just happened you called us and we got a thing saying you had to hit one to hear from you
No, it was basically
You know, take a chance and see what happens. You know what it was. It was Google again. It was it was it was Google voice
That's making us hit one for some reason sounded chipper. I'll do that. I'll do that. I'm committed. Why are they making us do that?
Let's talk to Helen. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry
Where you're calling from Helen
Oh
Cool okay. Well, that's that's good. Good to hear. Are you are you staying safe?
Well, we're we're not doing too badly out here because of there's low density, you know
It low density so it's not quite as bad as in the city. Mm-hmm
I
Lived in the city for a while and I know what density means. Yeah. No, definitely
Are people in your area? Are they are they observing precautions? Are they behaving intelligently?
They are now they they weren't in the beginning
You know
residentially speaking
But there's signs in the in the stores, you know, no, we can't go into any store without a mask on right
And I guess that's true in the city also perhaps very much so yes and
But you know that there are always people who feel that somehow it doesn't apply to them or that the whole thing is is a joke
or just
some kind of a plot and it's really it's distressing and and
You know, it's it's why we're so far behind because if we had tackled this
Intelligently from the beginning we would not be anywhere near the the catastrophic state that we're in right now
Yeah, I don't understand why
Why why the cases are just spiraling out of control across the country when you know, I mean there's been so much said about
being careful
It's really it's kind of it's disturbing well, I mean, yeah, it's it's disturbing but the reason is right there
it's because people aren't taking it seriously and because they're being
told from the top down that this is nothing to really be worried about just look at that what Trump has been saying from the
beginning and
That's that's the reason that's why you're seeing this and and countries like New Zealand and Australia that that did the right thing
Yeah, they have a problem but nothing near even China where this began
They they tackled it in a way that was effective and while they they've had massive problems nothing to compare with us
It's it's it's astounding
Yeah, and I guess I guess they can kind of be as
Authoritarian, you know as I want to in some in some regards
I've been wondering about the you know, this virus though and how it started in China and
Just why it's so
Why it's such a doozy why it's so difficult to why has it been so difficult to get a vaccine
What what where did it? Where did it? I mean, I've been hearing it's the fault of the bat the poor little bat
They're always
Yeah, but by the way Helen if I could say
Somebody on Twitter posted this they they meant to be looking for Christmas hats and
And they they did a typo and they type Christmas bats and they were really happy
They did that because they just saw all these adorable pictures of bats with with Christmas costumes on
If you're looking to feel better about bats, that's one way to do it
Now what was this call in is this is this simply get get to know your neighbors
Your time or
Well
Theoretically, it's a continuation of the program. Everybody who is listening to the broadcast can also listen on this stream as well
They're both archived
But it's mostly a way for us to talk to our listeners because we can't do that when we're not in the studio
The reason for that is of course the FCC
Requires us not to say certain words and if somebody were to say one of those certain words
It's a long trip to get to the button to cut them off and we wouldn't make it in the seven-second delay that we have
so that's why
Yeah, we're on the internet now. So it you know, well, we're not going to be talking like sailors. It's still something that
We no longer have to worry about talk like pirates. We could talk like pirates, but let's not
I think I thought people kind of understood that they were supposed to be careful
Yeah, but you know if people don't understand enough to not get a deadly virus by by doing the basic precautions
They're they're sure not going to respect this
So it's it's unfortunate. Yeah, it's very unfortunate
But you know as far as as far as just this whole
pandemic and
and and how it's
How it's spreading and why it's so difficult as you were asking I would talk to
to someone in the medical profession or a scientist and get their theories not a politician not not a
someone in media that just relies on selling newspapers or
scaring people
There are scientific reasons why these things happen. It's not
Necessarily some kind of a plot it could be you know, it could be something
Engineered but it's highly unlikely that that is the cause of this
These kinds of things happen every century or so and the last time it happened was a century ago
So yeah, yeah the consensus from my understanding is that?
This was a naturally occurring
Novel virus. So it was a new virus that had not yet been seen and
in the
relative
historical timeframe
We're working with it was actually
Developed very quickly using a new vaccine platform called mRNA and
the genetic information about the virus was sequenced quite quickly and
posted from
Beijing or from China
itself
at the behest of the world
so a lot of people around the world have been learning more and more about this virus and its variants now we have
news of mutations and so forth, but definitely ask and get
some medical advice and some and and look into what researchers are saying and they're really learning at a
Incredible pace. So there's a lot of information out there about it Helen. Is there anything else you wanted to ask us it off the hook?
Well, okay, I was just going to put forward two theories about that but sure go ahead
No, I was just gonna say that
It seems like they're two theories about the virus either somebody walked into the jungle and got bitten by a bat or
Something or an intermediary or you know, the the folks over and
Ruhan were actually, you know working on it in a lab with perhaps with the idea to
Be safe, you know to maybe vaccinate their own people or it could be something completely different
It's always possible that what we believe is not true and that that that happens more often than not
People do any questions that you have for our caller
Rob, yeah
I mean, I just I just had the thought that you know in the field of virology
Which is very interesting if if you talk to a virologist for a while
It's it's an experience
But the the basic fact of the matter is new viruses are mutating together and popping up in the world all the time
It's just sometimes it's something that doesn't affect people at all
Sometimes it's something that will just give you the sniffles for a day or two or sometimes
It's something that will be really really serious like kovat 19
It's just this this is one of those occasions on which humanity lost the lottery as as it goes, you know
completely the complete randomness of how these things evolve just did not work in our favor this time around and
It's it's just a shame that the response to it has been so politicized where people are choosing to
Deliberately do irresponsible things because they think it they think they're making some kind of point or owning the other side, right?
And and here we are. That is why we are where we are now. No other reason
So hopefully cool heads prevail and we'll get to a better place
Early next year or throughout the year. It's going to take some time
Yeah
Well, it doesn't have to be confusing because the science is pretty straightforward
And it's everything that has happened has been something that has been explained to us
By scientists who have said this is what's going to happen next and no matter how much you object or refuse to abide by
The the guidelines that is what's going to happen and because of the things that we did over Thanksgiving
That's why the numbers are going up. Now. The things will continue to get worse, even though we have a vaccine
It's going to take time for that to happen
So the numbers that we're being told to look out for by the scientists are the numbers that we are going to get it's going
To be staggering. It's going to be heartbreaking
We can change that we can do more
But the way things look right now, I don't I don't really see that happening from the people at that refuse to cooperate
Well, as long as they cooperate and you cooperate and I cooperate and all your you know your crew there
I have to say I do enjoy enormously when I when you're like you guys are on air. I really do enjoy
Listening. I don't I can't say I understand everything
But I enjoy the conversation, you know that intelligent conversation. It's really quite nice. Well, thanks. Thanks. That's that makes it worthwhile because
you know, nobody understands everything and
you know, I've talked to
to the most
Intelligent of people on the planet who don't understand the phone system or
Or how to make something work on their computer. So nobody knows everything and we all excel at something
So thank you very much for the call and please keep listening
Okay, we'll do all right. I had one one extra question quickly. Go ahead
Okay. Okay
Have you all I mean, I'm sure this is sort of a rhetorical question
Been following the Cuba situation and the one the situation in Guangzhou
with the people the diplomats that got sick you mean from from the
From that was a microwave thing that yes. Yeah, we have we have been following that and I think
Data is still coming in as to what could have caused that and who might be behind it or if the anybody's behind it
Yeah, yeah close to the heart here
You might want to have a maybe you can do a program on that sometime. All right, well, we'll consider that
Thanks. Thanks again for the call. Yeah, that's actually really an interesting story that there is a lot of research and
concern
specifically for State Department employees who have not been able to get compensation and
help paying medical expenses believe it or not, but
There's been some really outstanding reporting on that issue and what we do and do not know and what the State Department's willing to say
which is some of what we were talking about earlier the murkiness of actually hearing about
incidents when they happen and where
Information flows get cut off over things like tradecraft and secret things that can't really be known
Let me give out the phone number. It's eight zero two, three, two, one four, two, two five
well, there it is and
Again for some reason Google seems to be requiring us to press one
Let's see if somebody got through without having to press one. Good evening. Is anybody there?
No, so we have to press one damn it. All right. Try it now. Is anybody there?
Wow, okay, so we have to figure out why Google's making us do that
Yeah, sorry for the holdup that literally didn't happen last week last week
We just picked up the phone and now they threw this monkey wrench at us reverted to some setting
But for us to do that
We have to pick up a phone and and press one and then hang it up and hope that the person is still there
I'll try to do it. All right. Call it. Where are you calling from?
Oh, we've heard of it very very exotic between Queens and Suffolk
That's correct. Mm-hmm. Yeah, actually it was officer
Joe Bolton was the the person you were trying to think of the personality. That's right
Yes
Yes Wow, officer Joe Bolton
Wow
And you know, I'm connected to YouTube and I'm not getting any kind of transmission. I'm just seeing an image of a
it looks like
Just a still image, I'm not hearing any audio or seeing any video. Are you having some transmission issues?
No
As far as I know, we are we I see those people on are we broadcasting Kyle?
Kyle you want to share what you're doing?
What you might not be going out that was a fine time to tell us that
Is that is that true? I mean we need to know these things
Well that the image
It looks like one of those things
Describe
Great. It's just green Poland. It's it. No, we know we know what the image is the image is something that's
Okay, well there shouldn't be video but there should be audio and Kyle is on it right now and
This what what you have discovered is one of our failings as far as
Not being able to know when we'd have
YouTube didn't tell us that we didn't have audio going out. So that's that's a problem right there. That's again Google by the way
Right. I don't know you guys know, but I I guess you probably heard about it
But in any case for anybody that didn't hear about it, I just wanted to let other
Listeners know that Andrew Cuomo signed legislation
Suspending the use and directing a study of facial recognition
Technology in schools. I heard that I heard that I heard that New York State was the first state to do this
Yeah, I think that's a good first step in the right direction
Definitely definitely Alex had you heard this
Alex
No, I did not I've been in the car for the last several hours
so I have been a bit out of touch, but that's news to me and and I'm glad you called and told me because it's
Extraordinarily interesting yesterday
Pretty recent. Yeah
Hmm yeah, I mean obviously that's a big hot
Okay, we have Kyle you have an update. Yeah, I'm really you're
The machine that was being used was the microphone was muted. So it was muting all the outbound right Wow
So we didn't know our own machine had him
Okay, wonderful. We don't be on YouTube now. I've just confirmed. Thank you Rob. Sorry about that
You know what be helpful is if you confirm that we don't have audio in the future. That would be nice
Telling us we have audio. Okay, that's what we assumed we had. Okay, so that was a
Why would anybody still be there now in the past would anybody still be listening we had
Monitored it so we didn't see if this if this was over the air. I was using the phones. I was helping with this
It's just too much. But here's the thing. We need a way of knowing when we don't have an audio feed
That's an important aspect of doing a radio show. Maybe we should have monitored it ourselves here
But is our caller still with us
Happy healthy new year and thank you again for the whole conference. It was the the highlight of what was a horrible year because of
Thanks. Do you know that?
It's all on YouTube now and you can relive the entire conference in in order just by by going to channel 2600 going on
Hope 2020 and just starting from the beginning
You can also see all the performances and workshops as well, which we've never had on YouTube before so it's all there
I look forward to doing that at some point in the very near future
So I I look forward to you guys doing it again, and I can't thank you enough
Like I said, it really it meant a lot to me. So you guys stay healthy and
Hope to see and listen to you more in the coming year. So thank you. Thank you so much
Thank you for your call, and we'll see you at the next help
Okay, so now that we again apologies to all the people who are just starting to hear us now
Well, at least the good news is that we've been recording on our end so that's yeah
You YouTube doesn't apparently won't have audio of that. But here's the thing that threw me
I kept giving out the phone number and when I get out the phone number people were calling so that told me that people were
Hearing me
Right. So why were they calling and and and and Helen didn't tell us we didn't have a feed
I don't know. Maybe there was some chatter elsewhere that
People knew we were going to be true and we're trying anyway, I don't know. I mean, okay, we have another call
Okay, we've got a bunch of going to hit one
If we have to yeah, probably okay and good evening. You're on off the hook over time
Bob said you can probably tell us better than anybody what has been going out over YouTube
Yeah, how embarrassing sorry about that, yeah, I didn't check the the mic on the laptop
Posted yeah, there were a couple calls. It was great conversation. Why was my microphone muted on my computer? I didn't get it
I have no idea. I only saw it because there's like an amber light on that specific damn computer
You know in addition to to to Google that I'm upset at I'm upset at my own computer
That I'm upset at my own computer. I don't know why I'm upset. I don't know why I'm upset
I'm upset at my own computer
You have many computers this one happens to be running Windows 10
Windows 10 is the most annoying operating system ever created because it just reboots whenever it feels like it even when you tell it don't
Do that it does it anyway, and when it does it it resets things takes away your settings
And you have things like muted microphones for no reason
So I'm pretty livid about that. It's the devil between between
missing the
The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn and this I don't know I don't know how I'm gonna keep it together
I really don't hey Bobson. Did you see the conjunction?
Come on you get Jupiter and Saturn over in Bulgaria, don't you?
Yeah, but the view to the West from where I live is very obstructed by
Building yeah, the West has that effect on Eastern Europe. I know I know
I know there are some people who got nice pictures who went to the nearby mountain
I
Didn't I'm sorry you didn't get to see it because when I heard about it. I thought hey, I hope
Emmanuel here's about this because it seems like something you would wanna observe
Disappointed to find out that you weren't able to
Yeah, I was I was pretty disappointed myself, but again as as I said on the show yesterday
You know I'll get over this if something else like only happens once every ten lifetimes
Happens, and I get to see it such as you know a supernova or you know an alien encounter of some sort
Eclipses no, I'm sorry eclipses happen a lot so that that doesn't count asteroids
Don't count comets don't even count because you get a bunch of those sometimes a good comet though the kind you can see in the daytime
All right, you know I'll accept that
But seriously I feel completely ripped off
I really do because this this was something I was looking forward to and the clouds just moved in just enough to obscure it
three days in a row and now it's gone and
Well no point crying over it
Photographs don't do it justice and and I you know we did see Kyle, and I went up to Tennessee and saw
The total solar eclipse a couple years ago nothing compares seeing that in person no no picture can possibly
Do that justice so these these things they need to be seen
I missed that because I was
Geographically far away, and I'm not sure how far I can see but I'm not sure how far I can see
Because I was geographically undisposed
Well Bobson any any other remarks from you we're gonna try and get one more phone call him before we sign off
Oh the show the show not not this part that we weren't broadcasting, okay
The type of weather that gets one to shovel snow because it's a great workout in my
Yes, you're absolutely Bobson
I was sore for for several days after dealing with the driveway the balcony and I used to live in Vermont which is
quite
Sorry, I remember years ago, and I used to work at a company that had a football sized parking lot for the employees
One winter we needed to get the people's cars out of the food or
Food and a half deep snow, and it was great fun, too
With nothing else to worry, but in terms of not much work was happening that those days
so it was great fun to shovel around the snow and
get
The pressure and all that
Now we have these gigantic piles of snow taller than me
And I'm really wondering how long they're gonna last or from a perspective of a science experiment because they're they're self-insulating at that point
Whether they're so cold and it's so cold outside
I'm really wondering you know if these giant piles that we have are gonna be here until February March could be kind of interesting
Well when you pile it up like this it the structures of it changes in a way that makes it much more durable
unfortunately, so it's not like the fluffy snow that
When you shine the Sun on it, it will melt, but you know and it you restructure the
Tiny pieces of ice into of something solid like a pile of snow it may last until
April and so on some occasions I remember from my
Childhood
Yeah, we all seem to remember it that way we're all seem to remember lots more snow when we were kids than then we get now
but
Hopefully those days those days return. Hopefully we get a
Good winter this year Bob's and always good to hear from you and stay safe out there in Bulgaria, and we hope to see you again soon
Yeah, we got to figure out how to how do we get that on up onto YouTube, but we'll have it on our website
Well, we have to get it onto YouTube somehow, too
You could probably add a...
I don't need it on YouTube
Same as I got the recording
Yeah, but here's the thing YouTube automatically makes it for you when you when you have a live stream
So if you have a live stream
And you have a live stream
And you have a live stream
And you have a live stream
And you have a live stream
It's gonna automatically make us one with 20 minutes of dead air
So we have to replace that somehow and and make it seem the same as if YouTube was making it so that it looks like
the other ones
What I'm saying is the archives on ftp2600.com
We can put a link
Yeah, you know that
We'll put a link in the comments or something
Or we can add an audio track
All this extra work we have to do now
I'm being a bit selfish
But yeah, it's very useful for
Someone such as myself
All right, Bobson be good. Thanks. Thanks for calling and we're gonna try and get one more one more phone call in
802 3 2 1 4 2 2 5 but yeah, we're gonna have to do that. We're going to somehow figure out how to how to
Pretend that's the YouTube archive that we're putting up on on the YouTube channel and get rid of the one that it's making now
That's defective. It sounds like like
like news like
Rewriting history, you know, you're it's very I mean, that's not what occurred what occurred was silence
well, I'm what's amazing is that I can make a
YouTube stream of silence and and just one picture that doesn't move and
It's not gonna say anything. It's not gonna say by the way, you're not recording anything. You're not streaming anything and
You know nice flashing warning sign saying no audio would be nice
It may have had a little bit of a banner alert, but we were not watching that. It's right in front of me
I didn't see any banner alert. So okay, sometimes it does that. All right
Well, we're gonna wait a couple minutes. See if we get another phone call
You know, it's 3 2 1 4 2 2 8 0 2 3 2 1 4 2 2 5 is our phone number
Alex go ahead
Sort of a line in the sand for posterity here during our were broadcast on WBA
I made three December 2020 during that time period
Trump apparently had pardoned Paul Manafort and and I know we didn't get to the issue of pardons during during the show
We wanted to discuss the potential pardons of Snowden and the Sun
Yeah, let's talk about this because this is something that's really on my mind and and bugging me a bit
I know we don't agree on who should get pardons and who shouldn't get pardons
But it just annoys the crap out of me to see all these people fawning over Trump saying oh, yeah
It'll be so good for your image. Please do that
Look you're a bastard. You're a jerk
and and and us asking you for anything is is the worst possible thing, but if you have any modicum of of
Self-respect or decency you should do this. That's the tone
I want to see them take to see people on the left, you know
Basically praising Trump in and thinking that he's going to do something that they want
It just it just strikes me as the wrong move Gila
So it all happened while we were on the air and I kept getting alerts on phone things were blowing up and
I saw a statement that came out from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which just thought really
encapsulated the whole thing brilliantly and
Because it wasn't just Paul Manafort that he pardoned tonight. He also
Pardoned Roger Stone and he pardoned Charles Kushner
Jared's father. Mm-hmm
Okay, President Trump has made it clear that he believes the purpose of the pardon is to bail out rich white men connected to him
Trump has turned an instrument of mercy and justice into just another way for him to be corrupt
Well, you're not being entirely
You're not being entirely fair there because it's not just rich white men connected to him. It's also war criminals
He's pardoning them as well, right? No, absolutely. Um, I
Am honestly terrified every time I see a breaking news alert on my phone because you never know what's coming next. Mm-hmm
Terrified it is terrifying and you know, let me ask you Alex again. We gave up from number one more time
We don't get another phone call. We're just gonna end this discussion afterwards 802 3 2 1 4 2 2 5
Alex
When when when something like what we have witnessed over the past couple of days has happened where war criminals people who have
Participated in massacres of innocent civilians in a foreign land and have been sentenced to life in prison
or 9-11 hijackers, you know it when when
Trump pardons people like that. Is there any recourse afterwards after they're let go can
Some kind of international court intervene. Is there anything that can be done?
Probably not probably not
You know, perhaps
You know that there may be
well for many of these
offenses
For which people have been pardoned. I think the statute of limitations at least in state state laws have probably
Run already. So these people are probably beyond the reach of the law right now
But there they are obviously not immune to the court of public opinion
And people ostracizing them and whatnot, but it really is, you know
And I think to go back to Gila's point
This really speaks to the the most vile ugly sort of nepotism in so many respects
He has just pardoned the people who were connected to him had benefited him in some way and then other vile
Personalities, you know almost seemingly at random and and I think Gila's quote there was was really really, you know, right on
Unfortunately, you know, this is a plenary power of the president and he can do with it what he sees fit
But generally we have presidents that are more mentally fit and
Ethically fit than the person that we've had in the White House for the last four years. Thank God
He will be going out
Hopefully without a bang with something akin to a whimper
But again, I mean look he he has on the table the ability to pardon both Assange and Snowden
In my opinion, I don't think he should pardon Snowden
I think Assange is is very questionable and more likely to be pardoned by Trump for the very reasons that Gila had mentioned
Which is that he's within the orbit of Roger Stone
Let's ask you a crazy question Alex. Could he just pardon?
Everybody can he just say everybody's in prison now you all get to go home
Could he do that is it's our Constitution that screwed up that he could actually do that
Yeah, I you know, I don't know I would guess, you know, perhaps he could but you know, you might need to specific
That is a broken Constitution, I'm sorry, you know, I
Bow down to the forefathers and all that crap, but come on already to give one guy that kind of power is wrong
Look, I have I have clients in the in the MDC and the Metropolitan Detention Center that are
way more deserving of
pardons then
Then Paul Manafort, for example, and you know, what if you could if you could pardon people essentially as a class, right?
That's that's what you're asking. What if you could just pardon everybody who's incarcerated on
federal drug offenses that you know fell into certain categories of the federal sentencing guidelines that we know now today are
unfair and and
racially discriminatory
I
Think that would be great if something like that happened, right?
Wouldn't it wouldn't it empty the prisons of these people that shouldn't have been there in the first place? Absolutely
Well, how about this? How about you know, you do good deeds?
You're like Mother Teresa you do amazing things and you help humanity and everybody says that you're a great person
You get a pardon, you know, you didn't commit a crime
So you don't have to worry about it
But you get handed a pardon which you can give to somebody else because you've proven yourself to be a good person
In that world Trump would not get any pardons. Believe me, but the good people of the world would help decide
Should this person be imprisoned or not? And I think that might actually be how it might sound crazy
I'm sure people will say but is the system we have now any less crazy
Well, you know governors also have the pardon power as well and a pardon with respect to state law offenses, you know
And and that's interesting, you know
I think on many many levels and and that's also been in subject to abuse and exploitation
Over the last several decades as well, you know pretty there's some egregious examples of that
But you know the one that gets the most attention obviously every four years are these pardons that happen on the way out
And it is not
Just a Republican phenomenon that where the pardon power is abused remember a Bill Clinton
Pardoning I think it was Mark Rich on his way out, which was very
Controversial at the time and and another form of nepotism and cronyism. And so this is again
But one person or did he do it to a bunch of people?
Well, I think he did to a bunch of people as well
He didn't just pardon Mark Rich, but that was one of the more controversial pardons that he had
But there are so many people that are more deserving of pardons than people that just happen to be within the orbit of the president
Yeah, there should be a fair way to make these determinations rather than the the women fancy of
Whoever's sitting in that seat seeing seeing Warren
Seeing seeing war criminals pardoned is something that really really affects me
And I think it it is going to permanently damage our reputation in the world
Uh when you know, it took it took seven years for those people to even be uh be
tried
Uh after after this this horrible incident
And now to just walk free it's it just says that the United States has has no real respect for law when it comes to
Uh applying it to its own citizens or or favored citizens
Anyway, uh, let's um, let's call it a night. Thank you. If those people listen, we're sorry about the uh, the outage
We're going to fix it. We'll put it online properly
And you know, it's interesting. This was our longest overtime too, even though it wasn't on the air. Maybe that's a secret
Um, we'll we'll try to do it right next week
Write to us oth at 2600.com
Good night
Well, we're going to be on before new year's oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. All right say something else happy
Happy any other holiday observances you might have this week? There you go