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for N-Y-C. It's, again, seven o'clock. Time for Off The Hook.
It's just about seven o'clock. Time for Off The Hook.
It's just about seven o'clock.
And a very good evening to revise program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this
Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Kyle. Yes, I'm here. And in Skypland, who do I see out there? I see Rob T.
Firefly. Good evening. I see Gila. Hello. I see Alex. Good evening. I don't see anybody else. That's it.
Right. OK. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Welcome back. It's our first show of 2021, if you can believe that.
Happy New Year. Yeah, indeed. Happy New Year. We weren't on last week. And guess what?
We're not going to be on next week because it's Inauguration Day, for those of you who believe in inaugurations.
And we'll get to that. I guess we'll just jump right in.
Well, it's a good thing we weren't on last week because I think there just would have been a lot of us kind of staring at the TV set
with open mouths and being able to really articulate what's what was happening.
But oh, my God. I mean, it's still kind of look, Alex is gone. He left.
He couldn't even deal with it. Wow. One minute into the show and he's gone.
Are you back? OK, good. The whole picture of what was going on was not clear at the time either.
So there was a lot of disparate stories and an idea of it.
One report likened it from the journalists on the ground to watching something through a straw.
Like we got a very tiny picture of it. Like I don't do that often, but wow.
Just a very limited field of vision. But in the days after, a much wider picture has sort of come into focus.
And there's a bit of a delay. I think a lot of people, it's taken time for them to process and read up on what occurred.
A better analogy, if you're looking for intelligent life in space and you're just exploring a small part of the sky
and you never find intelligent life because you're not looking in enough places.
Gosh, I hope we have a better look at what actually happened than that in the next few days or weeks.
I think we know a lot more than we did a week ago, such as how much this was being planned.
It was being planned online in the open for weeks now with social media networks like Parler and places like that.
Of course, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, we're talking about the insurrection,
the attempted coup that took place one week ago, January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.
Anyone who says they were shocked or surprised by what happened either was in a coma or was in denial.
One of those two things you were in.
Because Trump had been basically advertising January 6 as the day to come to Washington, D.C. and take back your country.
And a lot of people took him up on that.
It was 100 percent Trump.
There was just no other way of interpreting this.
Now, he's recently, in the last half hour, given a statement where he's basically trying to say that this isn't what we're about.
This isn't about violence or vandalism or storming the Capitol or any of those things that I pretty much gave a wink to you to go ahead and do.
No, that's not who we are.
Let's be peaceful.
And by the way, this is just as bad as Twitter taking away my account.
He almost had me up until that point.
When he equates losing access because he's a dumbass, then you realize how insincere he actually is.
But this whole thing had been out there for many, many weeks.
Here's an example.
There was an interaction a few days before on a site called The Donald.
It's a website that was formed after Reddit banned the subreddit of the same name.
They promised violence against lawmakers, police, and journalists if Congress didn't reject the results of the 2020 election.
One person asked, what if Congress ignores the evidence?
And the reply was, storm the Capitol.
And that received more than 500 upvotes.
And another reply, you're effing right we do.
On pro-Trump social media website Parler, chat app Telegram and other corners of the far-right Internet.
I'm not sure it's fair to call Telegram far-right Internet.
I'm not even sure how much Telegram can do about something like this.
We can get into that later.
People discussed the Capitol Hill rally at which Trump spoke as the catalyst for a violent insurrection.
They've been using those forums to plan an uprising in plain sight.
And they executed it Wednesday afternoon, forcing Congress to flee its chambers as it met to certify the results of the election.
The whole world watched that.
The whole world saw that unfolding.
And when you see something like that, it does not go over well.
It does not land.
And I have to say, in the end, we, the people, fought back.
And we fought back hard.
And we took away some of the toys.
Because, hey, guess what?
Those aren't the dumbasses running technology.
It's the hackers running technology.
It's the tech wizards running technology.
It's not even the corporations running technology.
Because they answer to us.
And if we rise up in enough numbers and express our outrage enough, they have to listen.
Why do you think it took Twitter so damn long to ban this jerk?
It was because we finally had enough.
And seeing what happened last week, that was enough.
They had no choice.
Facebook had no choice.
Amazon had no choice.
They kicked Parler off their cloud.
Oh, that Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud song would be so perfect right now by the Stones.
Oh, wow.
I should have thought that.
But, yeah, they kicked them right off their cloud.
And the right wing is screaming censorship.
Guys, you understand what censorship is, right?
Do I have to explain censorship to Rob?
You know what it is, right?
Yeah.
I mean, censorship is obviously when a private business makes a decision as to who they do
or don't want to serve with their business.
Like, you know, when a bakery doesn't want to make a gay wedding cake.
That's totally censorship, right?
Well, I don't know why you had to bring that in.
That's going to complicate matters.
No, look, there's a difference between when the government tells you you cannot speak
and say certain things or you will be jailed.
That is censorship.
If a company says you're not somebody we want to do business with,
that's the company's right, you know?
And, you know, Alex, maybe you can speak to the gay wedding cake
because that just throws a monkey wrench into the whole thing.
But I don't know.
Does a company have the right to do something like that?
Is this the same thing we're talking about?
Well, it's a little bit different, right?
I mean, we're talking about the distinction between state action and private action.
I'm getting a weird echo.
Is anybody getting an echo?
No, that's just your voice.
Really?
You're all getting an echo?
We're getting an echo, yes.
Okay, Kyle, please look into the echo.
But if you can keep talking.
I'm not hearing the echo, and I hope our listeners aren't hearing the echo.
Yeah, I think it's still going a little bit.
I'm still hearing a faint echo in the back.
You can talk about the echo for the whole hour if you want.
We could, yeah.
Or let's try to make you pretend you're in space or something and you have to deal with this.
We are in space.
Don't forget that.
We are all in space, right?
So going back to the original point,
the distinction really here is about state action versus private action, right?
Whereas the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment, freedom of speech,
those are things that apply to the government.
They are prohibitions on actions that the government cannot do.
The government cannot abridge free speech.
Let's take the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for example.
They would have a hard time discriminating on viewpoint or on the basis of any kind of speech acts
because they are funded by the State of New York.
The same thing that would apply to the federal government and all of the states.
It was actually only through the process of incorporation that the Bill of Rights actually began to apply to the states.
Originally when our nation was conceived, the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in particular,
freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association, only applied to the federal government.
The states could do whatever the hell they wanted to do.
But it was through that process of incorporation and the 14th Amendment that these rights were then applied to the state governments.
It really has to do with governmental action.
Twitter is not a platform that's run by the government, thank God.
They have the right to determine who is on their platform and who is not on their platform.
They made a determination late in the game, in my opinion, to terminate the account of Donald Trump.
And what's scary to me about that is in so doing, by Twitter throwing Trump off of this platform,
really at the tail end of his presidency, that was an act of political pressure.
This was something that was done really as a matter of political expediency
because it became untenable for Twitter at that time to have Donald Trump on his platform any longer.
There was just too much clamor.
He had crossed a Rubicon from which he could never come back.
And that Rubicon apparently was insurrection and sedition.
That's a pretty goddamn hard line to cross.
But just why?
We have to ask ourselves, why up until that point did Twitter do almost nothing until the election?
After the election, they started flagging and tagging some of his posts.
They may not be true or they may not contain accurate information.
But up until that point, and there was a New York Times article about this last week,
or actually maybe just a couple of days ago, I can't exactly recall.
But they made the really good point.
If you look at the history of Twitter and the history of Donald Trump, there was a direct crossover.
And Twitter started to really take off when Donald Trump was a reality television star.
And they loved Donald Trump because he was inflammatory.
He said crazy things that people liked.
He caused conflict.
And because of that, he was a celebrity, one of these blue-check celebrities on their platform.
Twitter itself recommended millions of people to follow Donald Trump.
And literally, up until the insurrection of one week ago,
Twitter and these platforms have been profiting from the conflict that he has created.
And these platforms love conflict because they love eyeballs.
They want eyeballs and they want engagement on their platforms as much as possible.
So Donald Trump and his presidency had to have been a boom for Twitter.
And we have to remember, even though it was an act of political power for Twitter to shut down Donald Trump,
they are not serving the American people.
This is a private corporation.
The reason why they can terminate Donald Trump is because they are a private corporation.
And because they are a private corporation, they are not accountable to the American people.
They are accountable to their shareholders.
Up until last week, it was a great thing for the shareholders of Twitter to have Donald Trump on that platform.
But Alex, isn't it also somewhat on the shareholders to reflect what the people want?
Because I think it's the outrage of the people that led to them finally caving and saying,
okay, we've had enough of this.
Yeah, I agree.
It was great for them before.
The controversy, all the back and forth.
And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing.
It's terrible, the things he was saying.
But having the back and forth and having the engagement can be good.
But when it turns into calls for violence, when it turns into blatant lying and getting people to believe in conspiracy theories,
that's when you've crossed a line.
They started putting the notices saying that this tweet is not true.
It's basically spreading false information.
But then it got to the point after the insurrection that it was clear any further allowing of this sort of thing would lead to more violence.
And I don't know what the stockholders were saying, but the people were outraged.
And they were certainly saying, Twitter, you've got to get your ass in gear here.
So are you saying the people don't have that kind of an effect or does it have to be the stockholders or shareholders, whatever they're called?
I think that it was very clear that there was a tipping point last week where the people of this country no longer felt that it was good for Donald Trump to be in that position and having 88 million followers or something like that.
I mean, this massive megaphone from which he can spew misinformation and stir up divisiveness throughout the country leading to what amounted to not a riot,
but a deliberate assault on the Capitol is what really is coming out these days in terms of the intelligence and the planning that we're seeing.
And all of that seems to have been borne out of Donald Trump's statements.
I think we all agree on that.
And so that was really the tipping point.
I don't think that the American people really had much sway.
We had talked about it many, many times on this show in particular about the various instances of Donald Trump violating the terms of service, the terms of use and abusing the Twitter platform over and over and over again.
And if Emanuel, if you had done that, if Rob T. Firefly had done that, if Gila had done that, we'd have our accounts banned a hell of a long time ago.
But they kept him on this platform.
They persisted in having him on up into the point of an insurrection, an attack on the Capitol.
And I think that that is something that we need to grapple with, because at that point now, now throwing him off of Twitter.
Now this is has also become a big point of contention for these right wing extremists.
It's become a rallying cry.
It's become documented empirical evidence that big tech is against the right wing, is against conservatives and is discriminating against them.
Even though, look, they do have the right to discriminate.
It's certainly, as you mentioned, Emanuel, not in their best interest to discriminate because they like to have this dialectic, this back and forth discussion.
But we all know that that's not what Twitter has really become.
It has become the cesspool of divisiveness, an echo chamber of misinformation, even though it may have grand designs about allowing people to interact with everyone else around.
I don't really care.
What it's become to me is a platform that is ill suited for governmental use.
Donald Trump has normalized the use of Twitter, of tweets for diplomatic relations.
This is insane to me.
And now you have all of these world leaders and all of these politicians constantly using Twitter to push out official communications of the U.S. government.
Well, hold on a second.
You can't say Donald Trump's the only one that does that.
All government, even the Pope sends things out by Twitter.
I would say the abuse of people on the platform, but also the abuse of the platform for official business is probably a valid point that people are going to look back at.
Because the way he was using the platform for official business as a crutch for actually doing the business of being a president.
I think if you look at the way the Obama administration used social media versus the way Trump has dominated on that platform, I think you could definitely and then did a comparison between that and like official press briefings or other forms of political communication that are more attuned to the office.
There may be some kind of reflection due because just the habit, the constant habit, conditioning us, conditioning staffers and reporters to consume and be a follower, literally a follower of the president, just because that's all you had to.
And so those points absolutely, I think, will be something we look back at with real shame, I think, and just in sadness that we didn't see it.
And that's, I think, how this mob and this rally occurred.
He knew the strength that he could whip up because he'd been on the road doing that.
And the craziness of allowing a political rally, a political campaign rally, campaign event, essentially, during the certification of ballots.
But it's not a campaign event. He lost.
Exactly. But it was essentially a political event to air political grievances and then ultimately turn it into violent action.
So I just feel like he conditioned a lot of people within his administration to think like, oh, it's just another one of those political rallies we've been doing.
Outside the White House.
Rush the Capitol. Yeah.
So those are all aspects of this.
There's abuse on so many levels. Rob, go ahead.
And we're still trying to get used to this media environment we have now with social media.
And past presidents have had all their ways of getting information out to the public.
None of them were so direct as something like Twitter, which is mixing the official business and the official government announcements, which need to be made available to the public, with just whatever randomness farts out of his brain.
So many people on the net now have their separate personal and business accounts if they're running their business.
And one has its own voice. The other has its own voice.
But imagine some presidents of the past putting all their communications through one commercial enterprise, one commercial for-profit television station, one commercial newspaper, and everyone else had to pay attention to it through that.
And that's the position in which Twitter found themselves.
And it could be great for their numbers, but it also – maybe it grinds on some sort of flicker of a sense of social responsibility that the people in control of it have every so often.
And it ended up actually backfiring.
Well, I think there's no question that Twitter has too much power, that Facebook, Google have too much power.
I think we'd be better served with a whole bunch of companies.
But I certainly don't want the government taking over and dictating things, because look at the government we've had.
And I certainly would not trust them to do any of that.
I do think that if you had a whole bunch of smaller companies, they'd all pretty much reach the same conclusions for the same reasons.
One other entity that we haven't really focused upon are the employees, the engineers, the people that make these companies go.
When they get pissed off, things stop.
Things stop working.
And I think you saw a situation at all these companies where people who work there just had it and weren't going to take any more.
So regardless of what the shareholders were saying, I think they would have shut it down one way or another.
I just think there's a point.
And when people are storming the Capitol and threatening to assassinate people that are in the Capitol, I think that's the point where you start reassessing.
Alex?
Alex, are you there?
You're muted.
I'm here.
Can you guys hear me all right?
Yes, we hear you fine.
There's no echo.
You're fine.
All right.
It's curious because I'm having some Wi-Fi issues here.
You were going in and out on me there.
But, you know, look, I don't disagree.
And I think that was also…
Okay.
Well, now you're frozen.
…the engineer.
You froze for a second there.
Do you want to reboot maybe or something?
Yeah, you're totally frozen.
This doesn't usually happen.
Usually we have…
No, I should be back.
Are you back?
Okay.
This never happened to you before?
And you're frozen again.
This is so unlike Alex.
It's like watching The Daily Show where people freeze.
We don't freeze here on BAI.
A lot of people have had that feeling in the last week.
Okay.
Well, listen.
While Alex is thawing himself out, what I'd like to do is play an excerpt because there
are so many things that have been posted online in this past week.
And some things are better than other things.
This, I think, is one of the best things ever.
And I would like people to take a listen to that.
I'm sorry.
Sorry for that horrible noise.
That's our board on our end.
Please, if you're in New York City, I want you to turn your speakers up.
I want this voice to resonate.
I want this voice to be heard in the streets because what they have to say needs to be
heard.
I hope you're f***ing happy and sad, you f***ing little piss pants pieces of s***.
We're going to storm the Capitol.
Let's storm the Capitol.
We're patriots.
You're a f***ing coward.
Patriots.
Jesus Christ.
F***ing idiots that I played high school football with wearing a goddamn American flag bandana
talking about, we got to get up there and storm.
We got to take our country back.
For what?
For f***ing what?
What are you so goddamn upset about?
What has anyone ever done to you?
You f***ing entitled pieces of s***.
Don't you ever f***ing call me one again.
Don't you ever say, Corey, you f***ing snowflake.
You're a liberal.
That means that y'all look, look, look.
What?
Want some people to not be sick every now and then?
Is this the thing that you can't f***ing stand?
So you've got to get in your goddamn f***ing piece of s*** Ford F-150 you got from your
dad, drive it to DC and pitch a f***ing fit?
Is that what it is?
Is it healthcare?
Is it still with the f***ing guns?
Is that what, what is it?
You said Obama was taking them.
Eight f***ing years ago you said that.
Nothing.
What is it that this country hasn't f***ing given you?
You literally got escorted out of the Capitol building aside from the ones that they had
to f***ing shoot.
Is that what it takes?
Did you just want to be a f***ing martyr?
God, you're so f***ing pathetic.
Do you not ever just sit there and think my kids are going to see this.
My grandkids are going to see this.
They're going to put it in the textbook and you're going to look like the dumbest mother
f***er in the world.
Nobody will give a s*** about Watergate.
Nobody.
That is f***ing, dude I'm out of breath from how stupid y'all are.
What is it that this country doesn't give you that you think you have to do some bulls***
like this.
When you see a f***ing black person actually get shot.
No gun in their hands.
Nothing.
Oh, they should just comply.
F*** you.
F*** you.
F*** you.
What is your goddamn problem?
Quit giving.
Just quit embarrassing me, man.
I want my f***ing country back.
How about that?
God damn it.
F*** y'all.
You f***ing cowards.
Oh, my God.
That is the most amazing thing that I think I have heard in a long time.
That is a gentleman named Corey Forrester, a comedian.
But in that instance, he is extremely serious and right on the money.
I just I want I want to request people never make fun of the accent again.
Never do that because you cannot judge somebody by an accent.
Judge them by their words.
And in this case, the words were something that I think we can we can all identify with.
And I'll tell you something.
You know, we've been Kyle.
I've been to the Deep South so many times and Midwest and all over the country.
And it takes a lot for people to be able to express themselves in a progressive manner in places like that.
So those kind of words, they mean a lot more coming from some backwoods small town than they do from from from New York City.
And, you know, of course, they matter both ways.
But think about what people are overcoming.
And I just it resonates so much more for me.
And hearing it from hearing it from exactly hearing it from other sides of the country, other places, you don't you don't hear it.
Hearing it in a voice is unfamiliar.
But this is a dialect.
This is a language that I think people from those areas can really relate to.
Or they know they're familiar.
They know they know what he's saying in ways that don't sound quite maybe as pretentious or something from from someone who isn't in the area or speaking with that dialect.
And I'm sorry about all the beeps.
But this is FM radio and the FCC does does hold the the rule book.
But you can find it on on Twitter pretty easily.
And hopefully, hopefully a lot of people hear those words and hear similar words.
Alex, are you back?
You figure out your technical issues.
Yeah, I did.
I apologize for that.
I lost Internet connectivity and reconnected back into the conversation about halfway through that.
I didn't know what the hell was going on.
You didn't hear the intro.
You just heard.
Oh, that's that's brilliant.
It was being beeped out.
I think the speaker really hints at a really interesting point here, too, because it actually hint is the wrong word.
I mean, he gets right at it.
You know what?
What the hell is it?
That's pretty direct.
What are you going and writing against?
I think the answer to that, though, is a lot scarier than we all really want to acknowledge.
And again, it goes back to these platforms.
It goes back to Facebook.
It goes back to Twitter and the misinformation, disinformation and, quite frankly, the radicalization campaigns that have been going on for quite some time.
The mushing around and sticking fingers into the gray matters of our brains and twisting and turning and poking and prodding with our psychologies that has been going on for many years on these platforms.
And these people that stormed the Capitol did so not because they thought that Joe Biden was going to take away their guns, like he mentioned in the like the speaker had mentioned, you know, Obama didn't do that eight years ago.
They really believed that this was some kind of 1776 moment.
They didn't believe what they were doing was insurrection or sedition or terrorism.
They believed that what they were doing was right, that showing up was right, that planning and plotting this and taking over the Capitol and stopping the, quote unquote, steal of the vote was right.
And not only right, but it was the righteous thing to do.
And that to me is absolutely terrifying because it means that they have been convinced in one way or another by these echo chambers and the places from which they've chosen to receive their information that this is their moment.
And they were willing to go there.
And don't forget, we haven't even spoken about, you know, the pipe bombs and the guns that were around that point.
But this was an incredibly terrifying moment.
And some of the idiocy, sure, was funny, but it was really, I think, absolutely terrifying because of how convinced these people were of their righteousness.
Well, also, we see storming of government buildings in other countries and we cheer the people on.
But those are ostensibly regimes that are brutalizing people and deserve to be overthrown.
In this case, it was a fiction that was given to these people that the election was being stolen.
And a very dangerous situation shows the power of media and the social networks.
Gila.
The other thing that I was thinking, something else.
We watched Trump's most recent video not long before we went on air.
And hearing what he was saying and how it's feeding into the whole thing.
And it was if you're a follower of mine, if you believe in this, you know, my movement.
It's where the allegiances are.
And that is also terrifying to me.
But we were watching, you know, we were watching the certification vote last week.
We had C-SPAN on.
And when I heard someone shout, stop the steal into whichever chamber it was, because I don't remember what version of C-SPAN we were watching at that point.
My heart stopped.
It just stopped.
And the idea that this is all right and correct and well and good.
And that people planned so far ahead that someone was able to construct a gallows on the Capitol lawn.
There was a literal gallows there in case they found Mike Pence, I think.
They were ready to go.
They brought the lumber.
I don't understand.
I'm really curious if some of these phrases were focus group tested in the same way they were for the run up to some of the campaigns, like stop the steal.
And if anyone's looked into this in light of the Cambridge Analytica stuff and basically weaponized to do this kind of activity.
Because the kind of data and the way that was handled for some of the election stuff before to be used post-election for an actual hostile takeover is actually where that kind of technology came from.
But now it was actually deployed as a sort of psychological warfare technique.
But those phrases seem too familiar and too much like the phrases we'd heard before that were all tested in that way.
Alex, I'd like to bring you in as far as the technological issue of domain names.
And if you've noticed anything odd or interesting going on with new registrations, I don't know if you're able to see transfers.
I know that Parler has been trying all sorts of ways to get back onto the Internet.
And the latest, I believe they're going to some company in Washington State called Epic.
Yeah, Epic, E-P-I.
Yeah, which would be an Epic mistake for them, I think, the company Epic, if they accepted them.
But I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you would be able to detect.
Have you seen any perhaps Parler-related sites or anything that's of interest?
Oh, yeah, I've got lots.
We've been seeing lots of it.
And that is something we can detect on our platform if we're watching a domain.
Obviously, that's pretty easy to detect.
They move their registrars.
Epic is known to be a pretty – I wouldn't say it's a bulletproof registrar, like a bulletproof host, but they are very protective of conservatives.
And they're known to be sort of a haven for right-wing outlets.
Places that can't find a registrar elsewhere can go over to Epic.
And look, they're a domain registrar like anybody else.
And I have mixed feelings and mixed emotions about them giving haven to various sites.
But even as abhorrent as some of the speech is, a lot of it of what they do and what they allow to be registered with their registrar is protected by the First Amendment.
These types of calls to insurrection and sedition certainly would not be.
But some of the other sites and domains that they host probably are.
Interestingly enough, the CEO of Epic I've known for a while.
His name is actually Rob Monster.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
The guy's name is Monster?
Literally, his name is Monster.
What world is this that we are in?
I don't know.
I mean, you have to ask him the genealogy of that name.
Is that his IRC handle or something?
Or is that actually his – if I look for his birth certificate, I will find the Monster family?
Oh, I have e-mails from him, from Rob Monster.
You can make e-mails come from anybody.
That's not convincing.
I want to know.
Is Monster his – okay, we can devote more time to this later.
Tell us what you found.
Well, we've also been watching.
And, in fact, if I pull up my active SSH session right now – oh, but because I lost my Internet connection, I have to reconnect.
But we've been watching a lot of insurrection-related domain names as well.
And there has been a massive amount of activity with respect to insurrection domain names.
And not surprisingly – and one of the ones that I thought was very interesting, just from a timing perspective,
was that right around the time of the insurrection itself – in fact, we can look at this.
I'm going to pull up the data right now.
You know, listeners can tell what keys you're pressing.
The good listeners can.
Different keys make different sounds.
Just wanted to let you know that.
It's a hacker show, so you should know that.
Yeah.
Well, I certainly hope so.
I'll change your password.
I would definitely change your password.
I have various passwords here, too.
WeTheInsurrection.com was one that I thought was kind of interesting because that was registered on the 6th, one week ago, from today.
And this is Zulu time.
So that's generally Greenwich Mean Time.
So it would be plus five from here.
Zulu time?
Zulu time, yeah.
Do they use that because it sounds cool?
Yeah, I don't know.
Again, that's another thing of which I'm not aware of the origin.
But it's a pretty standard term.
Is it?
All right.
Yeah.
And domain registrations are usually always in Zulu time.
They've got the Z at the end of it denoting it's Zulu.
So that was at 2222 Zulu time.
So that would be about 5 p.m. or so on the 6th.
And that was WeTheInsurrection.com.
Now, I haven't seen much going on on that particular site.
But shortly thereafter, and I'm going to tell you right now how many domains we've found.
So we've been seeing around 25 to sometimes more than that, sometimes 30, 40 insurrection-related domain names every single week.
I'm sorry, every single day.
TrumpsInsurrection.com, TrumpInsurrection.wiki, the 2021 Insurrection, Insurrection 2021.
I mean, it's CapitolHillInsurrection.com.
How many did you say in a day you were seeing?
Usually around 20 to 30.
That's not that many.
That could be some bored school kid trying to squat on some domain names.
Well, relatively speaking, it is a lot.
I mean, consider something like the World Cup or the Super Bowl where you would see maybe 5 to 10 domain names registered on a very active day targeting that particular event, whether it's live streaming or merchandise or some kind of ticket-related fraud, something like that.
But as a worldwide event, 30 domains per day is actually pretty active for something like this.
Here's another one that's strange that we picked up on the 10th of January.
TheInsurrectionScream.com was registered that.
And then there's Republican Insurrection that same day, Insurrection Wednesday.
So there's been quite a lot of activity when it comes to insurrection-related domain names.
Registered today was theInsurrectionPresident.com.
Okay.
That's what he's going to be known as.
Well, what I'm really curious about, I don't know if you have the ability to do this.
It might be a good idea for the future.
But how many of these registered domains turn into actual sites?
I think that really tells the story.
Yeah, we can look at it.
That just requires iterations, right, looking at the data over and over and over again.
Because obviously looking at the data at the point of registration is a lot different because it's going to take a day, sometimes a week.
So the longer you wait, the more domains you see actively being used for something or another.
But then some of this, too, you have to remember is that you don't need a website to activate a domain name.
They can have an MX record or a mail server record.
So a lot of these domains can be used for sending mail.
They're not necessarily going to be used for hosting content.
It could be for getting back in touch with people.
And perhaps this is a way to segue into what we saw with the Parler site and the leaks.
Because one of my hypotheses about the leaked data from Parler or data that archivists were able to acquire from Parler is that not only is law enforcement and private researchers,
not only is this data going to be useful to law enforcement and private researchers,
but we also have to think that this data is also going to be useful to the extremists themselves, technically adept extremists themselves,
who have now been deplatformed.
They need a way to get back together.
Well, all of that archived data is going to have all of their contact information.
Let's back up a second because we haven't really talked about the story that you're talking about.
70 terabytes of Parler data was exposed and leaked.
First of all, does anybody know how this happened?
70 terabytes, pretty much everything.
I think it includes private messages, too.
Am I right on that?
That goes back and forth.
I don't think anybody knows exactly what's in there unless you're hosting one of the – or you have all of the data and you've looked in there.
I've seen reports that say private messages are and then they aren't in there.
Deleted messages, deleted content does seem to be part of this leak, though.
Yeah, we can only go on what's been reported, and no one's really seen it or seen that many samples definitively.
There's been stuff posted by some of the researchers behind it, but alleged to have stuff that may have even deleted posts, private posts,
as well as media, specifically videos and pictures, including stuff like metadata.
I do know that the index of the files is linked to torrents and other things that are already out there,
and this basically was exfiltrated by exploiting a third-party API that – I believe Twilio – that was being used by Parler.
What happened was they stopped using the login credential system after a certain point when their shutdown from Amazon was announced.
This third-party API was able to be exploited so that a whole bunch of accounts could be created with the ability to bypass creating login credentials.
Wow.
What I think the researchers did is create a whole swath of accounts, or just a couple of accounts.
I'm not really sure exactly, but either they made a whole bunch of accounts to download it all,
or they made lateral moves to get administrative access, or they were able to see the hierarchies of them,
get administrative access to some of the accounts, and then exfiltrate the data,
either with simulated accounts, like a whole ton of them, or through another method.
But that's as much as I could glean from it.
I think we can say that having all this data can be helpful to the people that were on the Parler system,
but I think really it's going to be helpful for those people that want to investigate just what was going on there
and how much it was tied to what happened a week ago.
There's one message – I don't know if this came about as a result of the leak.
I think it was actually known about before then – that was basically being passed around on Parler
and not being taken care of by the Parler administrators, one of the reasons why they don't have a home right now.
It said this,
Remember, all journalists are soft targets and a fair game in the coming revolution.
Don't be afraid to take reporters down by any means necessary.
And that's not an isolated comment.
There are public radio stations right now that are locked down as a result of this.
People are really, really afraid of what could be happening right now.
If you look online, you'll see there's a video of CNN reporters basically running for their lives outside the Capitol,
having an angry mob surround them, destroying their equipment, saying all kinds of horrible things to them,
all based on what Trump was saying about the media, CNN in particular.
And it was disgusting to see this.
It was so frightening.
They destroyed all their equipment, and there was one guy that was trying to help them,
shouting at people, saying, this is not who we are.
He's wrong.
That's exactly who they are.
Maybe it's not who he was, but it's exactly what that crowd was.
And by saying that this is not who we are, and by the way, people, you need to get out of here or you're going to get hurt.
It's kind of emphasizing the point that is who they are.
What really irks me about that is the way that that serves them to do these crimes without a witness, without the public bearing witness.
And the media, this is a crystal clear example of why the media is important.
That's why they have to cover events.
That's why they have to investigate and be given access, so that they can tell people what's going on,
and you don't have violent coups happen in secret.
By the way, I just want to make this announcement you're listening to off the hook on WBAI.
At 8 o'clock, we are going into overtime, and that is accessible on our YouTube channel, which is channel 2600.
So type youtube.com slash channel 2600, and the overtime piece will open up at 8 o'clock, and you can call us.
That's a difference.
You can call us.
We can't take calls on the radio right now because we're in a remote location.
We don't have access to the delay system and all that.
But you can call us, and the phone number to call us at 8 o'clock and beyond is 802-321-HACK.
That's 802-321-4225.
Alex, I believe you had something to add.
Sure.
One other point about this parlor data, and I know we presupposed some knowledge on the part of the listeners here about this right wing outlet.
It's been all over the news, but I think another great use for this particular data, if you think about it from a law enforcement perspective,
is that because they collected so much information about the parlor users themselves and become a verified user, people had to,
and this is really hilarious, people had to upload photos of their driver's licenses.
So this is always leading to a question of whether or not the parlor site was a honeypot to catch these types of personalities that were interested in things like insurrection to begin with.
But if I were a Department of Justice attorney or working as an FBI agent investigating this, I would definitely be looking at that parlor data.
You're probably going to get a copy of the data from Amazon Web Services, from AWS.
It may not be the entirety of the data that was archived, however.
So all of this data is going to be really useful.
All of the email addresses, all of the other accounts, the contact data, the work addresses of people that were involved in this insurrection can now be the subject of additional surveillance, additional search warrants.
So this parlor data leak could be a gift that really keeps on going when it comes to, really keeps on giving rather, when it comes to tracking and surveilling these types of right-wing extremist groups if the data is used properly.
Go ahead, Rob.
First of all, we have to give a shout to Donk Enby, who is the hacker who first enabled all this, who basically found the ways to get in and extract this data from a parlor.
That's D-O-N-K underscore E-N-B-Y on Twitter.
Haven't you just put a big target on his head now for the whole right wing to come after him?
No, I put a big target on her head.
I gave you a chance to get out of it too.
Wow.
No, but she's been very open about what she's doing and how she's doing it.
There's a very good story on vice.com, which I encourage listeners to check out, where she was interviewed and went into the technical details.
But also, there was something you mentioned before about the hardware being destroyed while people were in there.
And that opens up something that nobody is talking about, and I think our listeners will be especially interested in.
These people had physical access to all that equipment in the Capitol.
They had access to computers.
They were playing on the phones.
People walked out with computers.
And anyone in information security knows whatever countermeasures you have up, whatever firewalls you have up, physical access is basically you've lost.
All bets are off.
And there were lots of posts and sentiments being posted around where people were looking at this and going,
every piece of equipment in that building has got to be considered compromised now.
You don't know what people were putting into USB drive slots.
You don't know what people were adding or taking away.
One false phone charger cable with hardware hidden in it to enable spying gets left on a desk somewhere, and that's it.
And after the insurrection, when everyone went back to work and they went back to certifying the election, everyone was back on their phones.
Everyone was back on their computers.
God only knows what happened.
It's an information security nightmare what happened, and there's been no mention of it.
I have seen mention of it, and I have seen people chastising Nancy Pelosi for, why did you leave your computer unlocked?
When an angry mob is breaking through the doors, sometimes people don't have a chance to shut down cleanly, and her staff basically were hiding in another room.
It's disgusting to think of these things.
In addition to the compromising of data or the possible malware, think of anything that could have been planted, listening devices, keyboard loggers.
Anyone who had half a brain and some interest in technology could have done something like this, and it would take a long time, if ever, to detect this.
They were back on the floor a few hours later.
There's no way they could have completely swept the place for listening devices or all sorts of other things in that short period of time.
So yeah, when you compromise like that, it's extremely serious, and when you consider the stakes here, it's very, very disturbing.
There's really no time, though, to intervene with that.
They were committed to continuing the business of our established form of government instead of entertaining this coup.
Can I just give a plug for a site that we put together?
You might recall January 6 was the day when certain members of Congress decided they were going to try and overturn the election.
That's in addition to the angry mob storming the Capitol.
We put up a site where basically their information is posted so that you can contact them, or you can visit their offices, or you can tweet at them, or you can call them.
You can send them a fax.
They're all listed on this site, and the site is called usa.wtf.
Not kidding.
That is our domain, usa.wtf.
If you go there, you'll see a list of everybody who took part in this coup attempt that is part of the government, and that is a significant part of all this because, if you recall, there were basically very few cops that were there to protect the Capitol, less than on a normal day, in fact, and certainly no additional forces.
The reason for that was because it was set up that way.
It was set up so that there would not be enough law enforcement to prevent the crowd from coming in.
Trump put people in charge in the weeks beforehand for that very purpose.
This is part of a larger conspiracy, and what we did on this site was simply add those names and contact information so that people can do the right thing.
Hopefully, we make some changes so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again in the future.
Folks, we are pretty much out of time, and we want people to join us on Overtime, which, again, will be on YouTube, youtube.com slash channel 2600.
The phone number to call us is 802-321-4225.
I guess you can call us without listening, but it's best if you listen, too, because that way you can hear the conversation.
Folks, are you all going to make it over there?
We'll see you in a few minutes.
Otherwise, for those who are listening to the radio, keep listening to WBAI, and we will be back in, gosh, I guess two weeks.
Yeah, we'll be back in two weeks.
So, tune in.
Tune in in two weeks.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll see you on channel 2600 on YouTube at 8 o'clock.
We'll see you on BAI in two weeks.
Good night.
Guns guns
They torture all the women and children
And they put the men to the gun
Cause the guns in my front chair
Bring the waves on their own
Guns guns, they're shaking in terror
Guns guns, killing in error
Guns guns, guilty as
Guns guns, sha-la-la-la
A system built by the sweat of men
Creates assassins to kill off the youth
Take it in vain, we've got it, it can't help
This is a way where no drugs can stand
So the lawyers burn all the papers
And lock the keys in the legal engraver
A jury of a million faces
Shout it out, condemned out of hand
Guns guns, nobody's killing
Guns guns, the fooling around
Guns guns, the violence is singing
Guns guns, the silence, the sound
I like to be in Africa
I've been on the final drum
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Make sure you stick your tongue
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Pretending to be an American
I like to be in the U.S.A.
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Pretending that the wars are done
I like to be here, move over
Say goodbye to everyone
Guns guns, nobody's killing
Guns guns, the violence is singing
Guns guns, the fooling around
Guns guns, the silence, the sound
I like to be in Africa
I've been on the final drum
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Make sure you stick your tongue
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Pretending that the wars are done
I like to be in the U.S.A.
Love you, Mama
Okay, here we are. We are back. It's off-the-hook overtime. Let's make sure
everybody made it. Emmanuel here, Kyle? Yeah, I'm just gonna check that thing for
you. Check that thing. Yeah, please check that. Alex, are you there? I am indeed.
Okay, I hope your bandwidth survives the trip because it's got to go double.
Double for overtime. Rob, Gila, you're in the same place, so you both there? We are
indeed. Okay, both of you at the same time. They're load balancing. Okay, good, good. Well, we are here
overtime. First of all, anybody has anything additional they wanted to say
they weren't able to say on the show? Please, I know there's a lot to talk
about and time goes by so fast. Alex, I know you have some things. I always have
a few things. I mean, it's like this whole show is just like pulling the
string on a doll and getting them to speak whenever I'm here and I think, you
know, while we're waiting for a caller to come in, I want to say I definitely echo
the same sentiments as you and Rob and Gila and Kyle with regard to physical
access to the Senate and some of these computer systems and things. I definitely
think that there were foreign adversaries and foreign agents that had
to be part of that mob. It would have been extraordinarily bizarre. What a
missed opportunity if they weren't. I mean, imagine you're a spy and that's
going on. Hey, free access to the Capitol Building? Of course, there has to be.
You know, yet on the other hand, too, I mean, you do have to think about the
Capitol Building itself. It is a public building. People are allowed in there.
It's not like the White House. And so, you know, there's always the opportunity
for somebody to sneak around. It's not an entirely secure area. It's not a
skiff. It's not a, you know, a secure information facility, you know. But also
on the other hand, the Capitol does have access to classified documents and there
are classified documents there. And so from an intelligence perspective, that's
that's what's particularly scary to me. And we and if there were national
security implications arising from this seditious insurrection that we had last
Wednesday, we may never know about them.
We have a caller on the line. Caller, are you there?
I'm here. Good evening, folks.
It's Bobson again from Bulgaria.
Bobson.
Yes. I just wanted to tell you that you were missed not being on the radio last
week.
We missed not being on the radio as well as a lot of missing going on.
You were being missed as you weren't on the radio.
And we're being missed now for being on the radio. I'm sure. I'm sure of that as
well.
Well, yeah, I mean, it with all the bad news coming from the D.C. area and all
that on that day, I was looking forward to hearing your show on WB.
Well, we did tell you the week beforehand that we weren't going to be on the next
week. So, well, maybe I wasn't paying attention.
Maybe not.
Not not hearing the show with all the news coming in through various channels
was a bit of a minor bother.
Well, let's let's get this out of the way now.
We're not on next week.
So let's make sure there's no disappointment.
Oh, sorry to hear about it.
The thing about Zulu time, it was named because Zulu is the word used for the
last letter of the alphabet in the radio.
Right. OK.
The phonetic alphabet.
I just I don't mean to profess my ignorance, although I constantly do profess
my ignorance. But I always thought UTC, Greenwich Mean Time, I thought those were
the standards. I'm not familiar with Zulu being used.
It's the same time zone as GMT and UTC, but they use zero time for various
purposes. So it's shorter and the Z is called Zulu in the radio alphabet thing.
OK, someone show me the Z next time there's a time stamp.
Show me that Z.
It's two hours from it, but oh well.
Anything else other than the time zones that you wish to bring up?
Well, I was I enjoyed the show and last week was unpleasant and I hope you also
mentioned that P messaging thing that is there is a family of German architects
from the 14th century called Parler, which is how most people try and pronounce
it. But it's named after a French verb, the thing in it, which means to speak
pronounced Parler, which is what a connoisseur of mine pointed out.
Right. But somehow I can't I can't see, you know, talking about a group of
fascists and having a French word like that, although I guess there are a lot of
French fascists.
I'm talking about the service providers that the fascists were making use of.
And I heard it called Parler on Euronews television, so it's based in France.
Right. They're French to begin with.
Babson, let me let me ask you, was there much of a reaction in Bulgaria to what
was going on in D.C.
last week?
What kind of how is it reported in the media there?
I don't follow local media much because there's little to.
Well, you're in Bulgaria.
You must be aware of what people are saying or newspaper or just word in the
street. Yeah.
What's the reaction?
We're not getting out much because of the pandemic.
So you could be anywhere in the world and it doesn't matter because you have no
contact with anything.
Yeah. You pick up maybe, you know, straight conversations through the window or
something or people running around, holding signs, nothing like that.
Well, I didn't see any people running around holding signs.
OK, so that people are not running around Bulgaria holding signs.
No Trump rallies going on outside Babson's window.
So we know that much.
Well, not in my neighborhood anyway.
All right. I didn't try and see how things were going near the American embassy,
which is not very far away from my house, but it's a trip, I mean, two or three
subway stations or something like that.
So I know I haven't been there for years now.
Well, that's that's information that we now know.
Keep that in mind. Babson, final words, because we do want to take some more calls.
Oh, I, I, I leave my final words for several decades from now.
Thank you very much, if you don't mind.
And it's great hearing from you.
And you're fair enough.
All right. Well, stay safe over there.
And, yeah, we'll try to stay safe here as well.
And thank you for listening. And thank you for calling.
Sure. Have a great evening.
All right. So Babson in Bulgaria there.
That's one of our one of our regular callers here on overtime.
That means the phone is open again.
Eight zero two three two one four two two five.
We have a one line phone.
You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get one of those.
Now, Alex, I'd like for you to continue your your discourse about the security aspects
of invading the capital.
One thing you say that the capital is it's a public building.
And I think this is a defense.
A lot of a lot of these people are going to use that.
Oh, I didn't know I was intruding.
I didn't know I was trespassing because the capital is an open building.
It's, you know, it's part of part of our government.
And, you know, when we've been in these government buildings, once you're inside,
you become a part of the government.
And in these government buildings, once you're inside, you pretty much can walk around.
You even see some representatives.
One thing you can't do is go into Nancy Pelosi's office and sit at her desk.
That's pretty much out of bounds.
And I think anybody would know that as far as actually walking into the building.
I don't know. Is the expectation of a metal detector something that people should expect?
And if they just happen to find themselves inside the building without one, is that enough
for them to be able to realize that they maybe have broken in without realizing it?
Well, look, I mean, just like any place, right?
You're sometimes you're authorized to be there and sometimes you're not.
If you were having a barbecue at your house, Emmanuel, and you invited all the listeners
over to the barbecue and then at midnight you said, all right, everybody has to go home.
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
And Rob just decides to stick around.
He doesn't want to leave.
He's a lingerer. He's a malingerer.
You know, all kinds of things that Rob T.
Firefly is. He would be trespassing.
So if you are in a public place where you're not supposed to be at that particular time,
which on Wednesday, January 6th, they were not supposed to be in that building at that
particular time, they're trespassing just like you're trespassing if you hang out in a
public park after dark.
I can't believe Rob told you that story.
Wow. Inside baseball, but no, I would say if you're if you find yourself entering a
building through a door that's been smashed open by a big unruly mob, there's broken
glass and like tear gas canisters everywhere.
Chances are you're not supposed to be where you are.
And also, yeah, you're in a mob saying, let's storm the Capitol.
And you just heard this this big fat idiot tell you that you have to take back your
country and things like that.
It should dawn upon you that maybe maybe you've crossed the line.
The just to point out that the kinds of barriers and directional stuff that was there
was on par with like what you would see in a museum or what tour groups would obey.
This is beyond that.
These are not tour groups that are there to obey signs that say this area closed.
But they're not they're not reading.
Did you notice that so many of them walked between the ropes?
Well, that's a different.
OK, so so in by contrast, I think the sheer magnitude and weight of that place is so much
bigger than who they are that it just forced them to become spectators to its majesty,
like looking at all this history and being in that space.
It is a living space, a living expression of American history.
And so I think the behavior, because there are little velvet lanes there and there were
so many such a chaotic mix of people that the space sort of implored them to behave
that way or follow it.
And again, the confusion, I think a lot of people didn't really realize what they were
getting into because they're victims of their own delusion.
Well put. All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook overtime.
Hey, it's Bobcat.
How are you guys? Hey, how you doing?
What's up? Right.
So just to start, Trump is an idiot.
I did not vote for him twice and I'm not defending him now or any of these idiots.
But during the Kavanaugh hearings, Mitch McConnell's office was occupied.
There were people doing human megaphone in there.
They occupied another office building.
Amy Schumer got arrested and there's a picture of her online yelling at black and brown
Capitol Police officers waving her hands.
And then AOC occupied Nancy Pelosi's office, the same one that that idiot was putting
his feet on the desk.
And there were people sitting there with signs saying green jobs now.
So this is not new except for smashing the windows.
This stuff has happened before.
OK, but I think AOC paying a visit to Nancy Pelosi is a little different than some
jackass from Alabama sitting at your desk.
These were other people who were not AOC.
There were dozens of people jammed in that little office with the curtains, the nice
curtains in Nancy Pelosi's office that you said you shouldn't be occupying.
Well, it was occupied. They didn't break anything as far as I know.
They didn't steal anything that that redoubled to their benefit.
But every single thing that we're seeing happening now has happened before.
I keep hearing there hasn't been a Confederate flag ever in the U.S.
Capitol. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, they just got rid of the last Confederate flag,
which was the Alabama flag in June of last year.
And let's see, a terrorist attack in 1947, Puerto Rican national terrorist shot up the
House of Representatives.
So all of this has happened before.
It's just in a different format.
I condemn all of it.
And that's OK.
Well, let's just go with that last sentence.
Let's just go with that. I condemn all of it.
I think that's that's what what we all need to do at this point.
But Aguila, did you have something to add?
I did. I did. I'm going back to what Kyle was echoing again, saying about the stanchions.
I, you know, I believe that, you know, you could see the majesty of the place.
And I'm with you. And I'm fascinated that the the rule that they followed was stanchions.
Like I was watching somebody walking through Statuary Hall and moving the stanchions to
widen the aisle.
But the thing that I keep coming back to is the poop.
What poop? I don't know about this.
Oh, oh, oh, they pooped.
They put poop on the statues.
They pooped in the hallways.
There was human feces.
How do you how do you even do that in the middle of a crowd?
You just say, hey, I'm going to I'm going to let go right here.
Wow. I mean, you know, people there was probably enough cover to drop trowel without
being seen, I'm assuming.
But. Yes, there have been peaceful occupations before.
And when you think about when people were protesting a couple of years ago about
health care, about health, about health care being taken away and you see these really
visceral pictures of people with disabilities, people in wheelchairs being bodily
removed by the Capitol Police.
And then you compare that to these people being walked down the steps of the Capitol.
And I promise you that none of the previous protesters pooped in the Capitol and then
smeared it on Martin Van Buren.
At least not on purpose.
Wow. I just don't think any of the any of the things that have happened in there like
this, you could piece together them over in any way that would come close to what we
saw. And to have so much chaos, people with weapons and the possibility of
electronics being compromised and kill teams.
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah. Bobcat, any final word from you?
We got to open up the phone lines.
There's no there's no secret information that's kept in the congressional office, open
offices. It's all in secure compartment, compartmented facilities.
You don't have to worry about that.
Okay. One thing that a journalist did take that picture of a PC in Nancy Pelosi's
office was still logged on.
Obviously, there should be a timer on Windows login that could turn it off after five
minutes. All right.
Well, that free bit of advice we will pass on to the people in the Capitol building.
Bobcat, thanks for your call.
Good hearing from you. And keep listening.
All right. We will take care.
Bobcat and Bobson.
Those are our two calls so far.
So if you're if your name begins with Bobcaws, 802-321-4225.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, look, I think Bobcat, it's made a valid point here.
And also for the Gila's point, I think the issue here is that, you know, there may be
there may have been past protests and and occupations of certain offices that that were
very similar in kind.
But what we're talking about here is a massive difference of degree.
We've never seen anything.
So there's you know, that it's like a philosophical problem, right?
You know, you have differences of kind, differences of degree.
This obviously is was an occupation, an insurrection to a degree that has never been
seen at the Capitol in the history of this country.
And and that's why it is such a big deal.
I do. I think Bobcat's absolutely right.
You know, most of the classified stuff is going to be in skiffs.
Let's hope so. Let's hope so.
Yeah, let's hope so.
That's where Sissy and Hipsy, you know, the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would do their work.
What do you call them?
Hipsy and Sissy.
I thought those were like the cats or something that live there.
That's OK.
It seems kind of a silly name for something serious.
None of the other. They're pretty serious.
Absolutely. So no, but I think his point is well taken, that this isn't entirely
unprecedented, but the degree to which the Capitol was occupied was certainly
unprecedented. Go ahead, Rob.
And we know why. And we know why that is.
It's because, you know, I don't have my history books in front of me, but I don't
think any of those past protests were by a crowd that's been whipped into a frenzy
by those sitting presidents of the United States down the frickin road.
Yeah, that's pretty doubtful.
We have another call. Let's take this call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook overtime.
Hi, I've never called before.
Welcome.
My name is Sal.
I just wanted to say thank you to you guys.
I came across your magazine for the first time in 1993.
I grew up in rural Texas and you opened up a whole universe for me.
Wow. I don't think if I if I had not found the magazine, I wouldn't do what I do
today. I wouldn't have gotten into so much trouble or met some great people.
But, yeah, like I'm really sad the era of freaking is kind of over.
But in a way, we won.
Yeah. Yeah. And first of all, thank you so much for that acknowledgement.
That really keeps us going.
But, you know, freaking is never over there.
There are always new challenges and and new things to invent and play with.
I don't know if you've heard us playing our old voicemail messages from decades ago.
There's just so much. Of course, that's still the past.
But there there are other developments and and just ways
of of creating new bits of technology.
So the important thing is the spirit.
You know, that's I think that spirit is very much alive today.
Oh, yeah. It's never going away.
It's just it's it's just really cool.
And I wanted to say thank you to you guys, because I know the last year I'm still a
subscriber. I know last year has been really hard.
And I'm really happy you guys have kept everything going.
You know, it kind of keeps my spirit going and I'm sure it means a lot to a lot of
people. Yeah. Well, your spirit means a lot to us.
And that's what keeps us going, because seriously, this has been a terrible year for
so many people. And and we face some very serious challenges.
But we we've made it this far thanks to people like you and and to all the people
that put hope together over the summer.
So fingers crossed, we're going to keep doing what we do.
And hopefully you'll keep doing what you do as well.
And stay enlightened.
That's all I wanted to say.
But I'm so glad you guys still have your show.
Thanks so much for the call. Take care.
Go ahead, Alex. You look like you had something to say.
Oh, I thought that was such a great call.
It's really, really awesome.
I mean, great to hear from somebody, you know, who's been such a long term reader,
subscriber. And I saw something the other day on Twitter.
I might have been a week ago or it was a few days ago.
But it was the it seemed like it was the thirty seventh anniversary of twenty six
hundred. That was the twelfth.
So wait a minute. It was today.
Yes, yesterday.
We mean last week. Yeah.
Apparently we mailed out our first issue on January 12th, 1984.
And we got into some sort of a weird tradition where we used to send it out literally
in envelopes. We go to the post office and they'd be canceled on that day because we
only had like 50 subscribers at that point.
But we just wound up doing it on the 12th of every month because back then we were a
three page newsletter that came out every month.
So I don't know how long we kept that up for at least six months.
Everything was mailed out on the 12th.
And then I think it fell on a Sunday at some point and we just sort of fell out of the
habit. A little bit of history there for you.
Yeah, but thirty seven years is is pretty incredible.
And obviously that spans, you know, when when our caller started listening in 1993, I
think I was probably I probably started listening and reading, writing around that same
time, maybe shortly thereafter.
I feel like I was in I think it was maybe 1994 when I started going to 2600
meetings in in Manhattan.
So, yeah, so she and I have got something in common.
And speaking of those meetings in Manhattan, a lot of people are asking, when will the
meetings happen? We don't know because we don't know as much as anybody else.
But I will say what we started the show with announcements about the vaccine.
The more people go and get that vaccine, the better, because that's one
less person that can catch covid-19.
And once enough people are around that can't catch it, the disease is going to have a
very hard time spreading and we'll be able to to move about freely
again, which will be great.
And those meetings will start up again.
We're going to kind of do a reboot and sort of start from scratch.
We'll probably have it'll seem like we have a lot less meetings because we're starting
from from zero.
But if you want to start a meeting, you'll be able to.
And we'll just have a whole bunch of of different meetings, which I think will be
great for those who don't know.
Twenty six hundred meetings. The magazine basically has very loosely affiliated
meetings, more like gatherings where readers, people who have interest in technology
meet on the first Friday of every month, usually in some kind of food court or public
space so that people can just come upon you by accident.
It's really amazing. We started the first ones back in 1987 at the what's known
now as a Citigroup building.
Back then it was a city court center and we just hung out there, met the most amazing
people. I remember the people from Hackers when they were making the
film stopped by a meeting.
We've had all kinds of people come by and other stories in other cities as well, from
Los Angeles to Austin, to Boston, to Chicago and and and small places as
well. So it's magic.
It really is. And having it all on the same day, I think that's really a pretty awesome
thing as well. Our phone lines are open.
I believe eight zero two three two one four two two five.
One thing we don't have is a light that tells us if somebody's on hold.
I don't think anybody is on hold.
And we also have to. This is what Kyle has to do every time we get a phone call.
You hear the phone ring, but he has to pick it up.
And because Google makes us do this for some reason, you have to hit a one and then hang
the phone back up. So that's not us being wise asses.
If you call in and you hear you hear a touchtone, that's Kyle picking up the phone,
hitting a one and hanging you up again so that you're next in line.
And here we go. He's hitting the one and I can hang up the phone.
And since we're not talking about anything else, I'm going to just bring the phone up now
and say, hello, you are on off the hook overtime.
How you doing, guys? I've been listening to the show, trying to call in, getting recordings.
I left you a message. But moving on, I just think this was a terrible, terrible thing.
But, you know, we haven't just had a wonderful, peaceful country from day one.
And we moved in and somebody was already here and everything went fine.
Some of this happened right from the beginning.
And then, you know, the books may say one thing.
We scalp people and then blame them for doing all the scalping and demonize them type of
thing. They had two story houses they lived in when we got here.
But to hear it told, oh, there were teepees and there were savages and and on and on and
on. I think this is terrible.
And the thing is, look at this bunch.
What kind of bunch is that?
And would you count on them to take over something or do they have discipline and
organization? They can't even hold themselves from defecating.
You know, it's interesting you say that because that's how I felt when the Trump
administration started.
Well, actually, that's how I felt during the election campaign in 2016.
What would happen if these people actually got in charge somehow?
What kind of a nightmare would that be?
Well, I have my answer to that now.
I know. But yeah, I take your point.
What kind of regime would the people storming the Capitol have instituted?
That would have been something. But I don't want to find that out at all.
You guys are doing a great job.
I'm going to email you something about that beautiful car in the driving, Miss
Daisy, because you talked about it.
But that's not the place right now for this show.
And that's on the other show, too.
Yes. Thank you so much. And where are you calling from?
I'm in Bradford, Brentwood.
I used to used to be on the board of elections and call you.
Oh, yes. Yes, I remember.
I'm going to Setauket tomorrow for dental.
I'm sorry, say again. And I'm going to Setauket to Stony Brook for dental tomorrow.
Oh, good. OK. An area you guys are familiar with.
Well, we were talking about the Setauket Patriots, which is a right wing group that
sent, I think, 400 people to the rally last week.
And and they're trying to tell people that they had they had nothing to do.
They they had nothing to do with the with with with the bad things.
They only did the good things.
Also, Suffolk Progressive, they were just in the news.
Well, they're they're the other side.
They they were basically outside Lee Zeldin's office, our local representative in
Suffolk County. Right. Right.
So, all right. Thanks.
Thanks for your call. Thanks for the support.
OK, I'm going to email you.
All right. Take care. You know, it's interesting.
We mentioned this on the other show last night on the other station.
I don't know if you guys know this, but Suffolk County is the most populated county in
the country that voted for Trump.
The country right here in New York.
What's wrong with this? Does it not surprise you?
You would think other places would would exceed.
Maybe we should just split up the county.
We were going to have a Pecana County at one point.
I would avoid things like this.
Honestly, it doesn't surprise me.
It's been such a Republican stronghold for so long that it, you know, it is is a
totally red place.
There are, I think, little pockets of blue here and there.
And from what I hear from friends of mine, gay friends of mine that are still out on
Long Island, that for a lot of these towns, a lot of these places feel very hostile to
them now because of all of the overt and in your face Trump supporters that are that
are roving around Long Island now.
Yeah, it's something.
And keep in mind, these people are not going away after Trump.
They're still going to and they're going to be mad.
And we've got to deal with this one way or another.
Gila, I know you had something.
I did, because I was thinking about Suffolk County.
I was looking at I was trying to find vaccine information for a family member who is
lives in Suffolk County and was eligible in Group 1B.
You can find great information about how to get vaccinated and where to go for Nassau
County. Suffolk County, I don't think, wants people to get vaccinated because we just do
not have decent information about where to go.
Well, we had we talked about something yesterday on the other show because we were in
Suffolk County. And I think if you just go to the Suffolk, SuffolkCounty.gov website,
it might not be the exact website, but there is a listing someplace of pharmacies.
But like Nassau County and New York City, like New York City, Nassau County have these
really user friendly, put in your like super easy to use.
Right. And Suffolk County, it was buried under so many layers of things.
You know, I just I found it very interesting and especially in light of what you're
saying now. Did you find it, though?
No. Well, OK, hang on, I'm finding I'm finding something right now, Suffolk County
and why it's different.
SuffolkCountyNY.gov slash vaccine.
And I don't know if there's a list there, but there's there's a frequently asked
question. So and where should I go to get vaccinated?
OK. State Department of Health will share additional information on where New Yorkers
get vaccinated. Asked you what you mean.
It's not exactly the easiest thing.
This is what I'm saying. Yeah, but there's a phone number you can call.
Eight three three six nine seven four eight two nine.
That's eight three three N.Y.S.
for VAX, VAX, NYS, New York State.
OK, so, yeah, if you if you persist, eventually you'll get somebody who at least will
be sympathetic. OK, good to know.
I'll pass that along and multiply that by every single county in the country.
And that's what we're facing right now.
Mm hmm. I just hope people get the vaccine because, you know, I'm hearing that I'm
hearing hospital workers are saying they're not going to get the vaccine.
What what kind of mentality is that you work in a hospital?
You should know better. And if people don't get the vaccine, this disease is going to
stick around for a whole lot longer.
So I don't know. People are very wary.
And the way this went and the way it was handled, dare I say, it's it's kind of made
people very skeptical of of what they've been told, because there's a lot of
mistrust for who really is an authority.
Why? Why is there mistrust?
I don't get that. And I'd be wary of the disease.
That's something to be wary of.
But I mean, everything that that we've been told by the people who know what they're
talking about, you know, the Dr.
Fauci's, everything has come true.
We've seen the spikes when they said we were going to see the spikes.
We've seen the numbers go up exactly as badly as they predicted.
And all the people that said there wasn't an issue, they've been proven to be wrong
time and time again. They keep infecting people.
That's another thing. You heard about the story in the Capitol where while they were
huddled hiding from the rampaging mob, there were Republicans who refused to put on
masks. And now some of their colleagues have caught COVID-19 because some of those
jackasses had the disease, refused to put on a mask and infected some of their some
of their fellow congresspeople.
I mean, for that, I think you should be kicked out of Congress.
There's a lot of things I think you should be kicked out of Congress for.
Let's see if we can take one more phone call.
802-321-4225.
We have an open line. 802-321-HAC is our phone number.
We're going to call it a night in just a couple of minutes.
But did you guys have anything additional to add that you're pointing at, Rob?
Yes, go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, just with the vaccine situation.
I mean, like I was very excited to hear about the vaccines.
I'm looking very much forward to getting it when it becomes available to me.
But I'm also very happy to wait my turn and let the people who need it first get
theirs, the frontline workers, the people at risk and so on.
But you're hearing about people in hospitals and such who don't want their vaccines.
There should be some kind of listing where people like me can go, well, can I have your
one? You're not using it?
Well, there's instances where people are in drugstores and there's an announcement on
the PA saying, anybody wants a shot, come to the back right now because it's about to
go bad because somebody didn't show up for an appointment.
And yeah, I don't spend a lot of time hanging out in drugstores.
But if that's the kind of thing you do, you might actually get lucky and be able to get
your shot early. But I looked up when I'm supposed to get mine, it's like, you know,
three people behind me in the list of of all the potential people that are supposed to
qualify. So it's going to be a while unless a lot of people don't want it.
Hey, you don't want it.
Take your chances. But I intend to go with science on this.
Go ahead, Alex.
We've been seeing some some interesting things as well in the DNS with the domain name
system with regard to the vaccine and scheduling and acquisition of the vaccine as
well. Shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody.
There's a lot of misinformation and a lot of fraud that comes along with with
vaccinations right now.
We've seen two things that are that are very concerning.
I want to address right now to the listeners.
One is we've seen a bunch of domains that have hosted content on them that pertain to
home vaccination services.
Sign up for this home vaccination service, pay one hundred dollars in advance and we'll
have somebody come to your home and vaccinate you so that you don't have to go to a
drugstore. You don't have to wait, et cetera.
Some of these even charge upwards of five thousand dollars for you to, like, let's say,
register your business for for a home vaccination or vaccination at the office space.
You do know the vaccine is free.
It doesn't cost anything.
Right. That's that's quite a profit they're making.
And there's no such thing as home vaccination right now.
Right. And so a lot of these, you know, we believe that these home vaccination services, if
anybody's getting emailed about them, if people are getting solicited for these types of
services, they should be extraordinarily skeptical.
Well, just because somebody comes to your house and stabs you with a needle doesn't mean
that they're qualified and doesn't mean you're getting the vaccine.
Can't believe I have to say this, but that's the truth.
And apparently that did happen to some elderly woman in the UK as well.
The other thing that we've seen, too, is that a lot of vaccination, vaccination scheduling
services. And in particular, we've found several retirement communities in Florida that
are distributing the vaccine to their populations are using very insecure scheduling
systems to make these appointments.
Namely, they're using Eventbrite or other online systems that require no authentication
whatsoever. So let's say hypothetically, you know, you're a threat actor or even somebody
who's an anti-vaxxer, somebody who believes that the vaccine is a mind control
complacency drug that, you know, is even worse than fluoride.
Right. And you just decide you want to write a script, write a bot that's going to take up all
of these vaccination spots.
It's very, very easy to do.
And in fact, there aren't all that many.
You wouldn't even have to write a script to do it.
Then you have. And if that's done through these insecure systems for scheduling vaccine
appointments, if that is done, then you have just created an administrative nightmare for
whoever or whatever medical office or personnel are supposed to be dealing with these
appointments. Because crap is really not helpful.
No, it is helpful because people need to know about this.
If if you can if you can destroy the system that easily and there are idiots out there that
want to destroy the system, you can bet the system's being destroyed.
Absolutely. And it's incredibly sad, too, because the only option that you would have in
that situation, if all these appointments were taken up by a bot, would be to cancel all the
appointments and then ask for somebody to make them all again or to re-verify every single
one of them. This could this could also be done by somebody who wants to get the shot early.
So nobody showed up for the shot that day.
So there's an extra shot.
Hey, you want it? OK, but it could also be by the anti-vaxxers.
This is very serious. And Alex, we want to I want to talk to you about this, because if it is, in
fact, that easy, people need to know about this and it needs to be a scandal.
And I think we have another call.
OK, take this call.
You didn't hit one hard enough, apparently, because Google is still on there.
OK. And we have a caller.
Go ahead. Yeah.
Hey. Let me do this.
I would like I'm very grateful for your program, and it's just amazing that we come up here
in Woodstock, New York, and there I'd like to send you some email about information about
the vaccine. I was wondering if that's something I could do that you I don't know your
email. Well, if you can if you can send an email, then you can definitely do it.
The email address is OTH at 2600 dot com.
That's OTH for off the hook and at 2600 dot com.
And that goes to everybody affiliated with the program.
OK, because I think it would be important for you to understand that there is information out
there that this thing they're calling a vaccine.
It's not a vaccine.
OK, well, you know, I can send you the information and send us the information.
And what we'll do is we'll look at it and we'll make a decision what we're going to do with it
after that. But thanks.
Thanks for the call.
That's that's all I have patience for right now.
I don't want to get into a debate about what a vaccine is, what a vaccine is.
And we're in a health crisis, people, and we have to deal with it.
And there's some element of trust you're going to have to display at some point towards people
who know what they're talking about.
And if there's some massive conspiracy that involves everybody from Venezuela to to
socialists to to to all sorts of election officials.
And it's just at some point you have to you have to say enough.
It's it doesn't make any sense.
You know. Yeah, I mean, there's a field hospital at the university.
There's, you know, trailers parked in front of hospitals.
There's a real crisis.
California is a mess right now.
Yeah, it's really, really tragic what's happening across the country.
So across the world.
Yeah. It's like if you want to question a vaccine, which one?
There's like 10 of them.
You know, people want to question the vaccine.
Go ahead. Question the vaccine.
Don't get the vaccine. I'll get the vaccine.
We'll see what happens.
You know, I don't know how much clearer I can be.
Go ahead, Rob. Yeah.
Among the types of work I've done for a living, one of them is hardware engineer.
And I would just like to put out there that there are no such things as microchips that
they can dissolve into a thing that get into a liquid that they could inject into you.
There was a there was a great story going around of what purported to be the diagram
of a microchip that Bill Gates was tricking you into getting vaccinated into you.
It was the diagram of a guitar effects pedal.
Like there's just so much crap out there.
And yeah, go with the science.
We believe in science, I think it's safe to say.
And we think you should.
Yeah. And if the scientists are all out to get you, you're going to lose anyway.
So you might as well.
No, that's a horrible thing to say.
But but come on, that's they're not out to get you.
They're not out to I don't know what people think scientists are going to do.
But let's look at look at the people that are anti science.
That's your crowd. Good luck.
Any final words?
I think those are pretty good final words on many levels, but just as much as possible,
I would like to wish everyone out there a very happy 2021.
Let's let's see how how good we can make this one.
It might be too late already.
I don't know where 15 days in less than 15 days in and already it's gone to crap.
But at least there's hope, at least there's hope that things will change in one week.
We'll have a new president.
Maybe that'll make a difference.
Well, of course, it's got to make a difference.
Kyle's got a big bottle of vodka, I think.
Was that gin? That's rum.
It's rum. It's all it's all clear.
So it's hard to see from a distance.
And Alex, you're holding something up.
What are you holding up? I can't see that.
This is Sasha. You've called a child on the phone.
Oh, wow. He's virtually.
Oh, that's that's your child.
OK, he's FaceTime bombing the show.
My son is FaceTime bombing off the hook over time right now.
Sasha, want to say hi to anybody?
No. OK, I like him.
He doesn't want to say hi to anybody.
But thank you. Thank you for that.
And and guys, I really look forward to seeing you in person again sometime, sometime.
Yeah, I've gotten too used to this.
Yeah, it'd be great to to enjoy what what hopefully the vaccination and the future in
2021 will hold some of the things we missed in 2020 a lot.
Yeah. Yeah.
Think about what you want to do, you know, when this is over.
It's a good hashtag, actually, when this is over.
What do you want to do?
Where do you want to go?
What what activity do you want to embark upon?
You know, you don't have to go anywhere.
You can stay in the neighborhood.
But there are so many things that we've all sacrificed over the past year.
And I don't know where to begin.
You know, I don't know where to start.
I'll say this. I want to go to Georgia because, boy, we owe them something.
Yeah. And I don't know.
Just appreciate people more.
Never really spent time in Atlanta, but yeah, doesn't have to be Atlanta being with
people being and for no reason just to share the presence of other people.
That's been a newfound love or something that was underrated before someone coughs
without covering their face.
You know, it's not the end of the world anymore.
That would be nice. That would be that would be something I look forward to that day
when someone coughs on me and I I don't panic.
You don't care at all.
I'll care. I will care.
I will get upset, but I won't.
You know, I won't call the police.
Well, I from my perspective, it will be great to see everybody in person again.
I was nostalgic even during the show today, thinking about how much I miss the
Wednesday night get togethers that we had and getting together at WBAI at the
station and then just hanging out with everyone afterwards.
It was the highlight of my week every week.
I really enjoyed it.
It was it was great.
And that was the highlight of your week.
What kind of life do you have?
I know. Tell me about it.
Well, I'm a lawyer, so we just get together, complain about things for an hour, you
know, and maybe get some food somewhere.
And that's that's it.
But think of it. He's right, though, like all the other producers and community
members at the station and and at the cafe there.
There's so many things in the neighborhood in Brooklyn we miss and our engineers
so helpful. Too many of those things have disappeared now as a result of greedy
landlords and just just expectations that were unreachable for so many.
So if we get through this, we're the lucky ones.
And let's let's hope that they come soon.
All right, guys, we will see you in two weeks.
I'm off the hook and on overtime, and please write to us, OTH at twenty six
hundred dot com. Stay safe.
Please don't don't raid any buildings and cause interactions and be thankful for the
things you have and try to make them better.
So no more sedition than usual.
See you all in two weeks with a new president.
Bye bye.