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One minute more!
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And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Hi.
We have Rob T. Firefly out in Skypland.
Good evening.
We have Gila also in Skypland.
Good evening.
And we have Alex in extra Skypland.
Good evening as well.
And where are you, Alex?
You're moving around in kind of a crazy way.
Well, OH.
I mean, it's part of the course these days, isn't it?
I'm not surprisingly, like many of our listeners, in Las Vegas right now.
Oh, yes.
You're there to see how high the temperature will get.
That's exactly right.
We're doing all different types of experiments with temperature and climate, air conditioning,
inside, outside, doing lots of comparisons between the temperatures inside and outside.
And believe it or not, there is a big variation between being in A.T. and outside in the desert.
So, surprising results.
I can imagine.
Of course, as many of our listeners know, you are there for DEF CON, the biggest hacker conference in the world.
And, yeah, please report back and let us know how things are going.
You're there early.
I'm glad you're not traveling during the show for once.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I kind of planned the travel so that I would be able to make the show.
So, I left early this morning.
I've been traveling to get to Vegas since, you know, I left New York at 7.30 this morning.
Flew out of Newark through Phoenix, barely made the connection, and then over to Vegas.
And I literally just got into the hotel room here.
So, like I said, it is quite hot, but I'm looking forward to the conference.
And it's a great thing.
We actually have a lot of people from my law firm here, and I think it's going to be fun.
Oh, no doubt.
No doubt.
We have some somber news this week.
Seems like we have so much somber news lately, but yet another dear friend of ours,
somebody who most everybody who has ever been to the HOPE Conference will remember,
our friend Cheshire Catalyst passed away on August the 6th.
Something that was surprising to many of us,
because I guess we all thought Cheshire was just a permanent part of the culture,
of the HOPE Conferences.
He was part of TAP Magazine before 2600 got started.
He was just a fixture.
In fact, you know, he made every single conference that we had in person,
every single in-person conference, Cheshire Catalyst was there.
I don't even know if I've been to all the conferences.
I'm pretty sure I have, but, you know, I know he has been.
The only one he missed was the virtual one.
It's funny that that was the one he couldn't attend, the one that wasn't in person.
But in person, you were guaranteed that Cheshire would be there,
and sadly that no longer will be the case.
I'd like to play something from our very first show back in 1988.
This was well before the HOPE Conferences even began.
It was shortly after 2600 began, and of course it was the first edition of Off the Hook.
We were just a special feature on that particular day.
In fact, it was the second attempt to present the show.
The first attempt in the afternoon of July was canceled
because of a fire in the Empire State Building transmitter room
right at the time that the show was going to go on.
So we rescheduled it for late night in October of 1988,
and that was, I think, a three-hour special.
The program wouldn't come back on the air for another couple of years
because it wasn't seen as a potential series at that point.
But Cheshire was a part of that.
We had a short interview with him, and I'd just like to play a bit of that.
You'll hear one of the sounds that we played to separate sections of the program,
kind of similar to what we do today.
Let's go back in time and listen.
Richard Cheshire is known as Cheshire Catalyst to phone freaks,
those strange people who love to play with telephones.
Cheshire Catalyst used to be a phone freak,
and he also used to write for TAP Magazine, which was a publication for phone freaks.
He says that for years, decades even, phone freaks have been making conference calls,
and needless to say, they rarely wound up paying for them.
Cheshire Catalyst recollects that he was a phone freak
and needless to say, they rarely wound up paying for them.
Cheshire Catalyst recollects one of the crude methods of making a conference call.
I remember back in the old days, back in the days of crossbar switches
and electromechanical, good, solid-cut chunking machines,
when we used to talk through the busy signal,
I don't think you can do that anymore with all the electronic stuff that's going on,
but through the beeps of the busy signal, you could hear voices.
And, bop, if, bop, you, bop, were, bop, to, bop, speak, bop, between the beeps,
you could actually carry on a conversation like that.
And a lot of people did.
That was from our October 1988 edition of Off the Hook,
the very first edition of this radio program,
brief interview with Cheshire Catalyst.
He had so much to say about the phone freak world,
the hacker world, the amateur radio world,
the world of rockets being launched from where he lived,
down in the area of Cape Canaveral,
and also the World Cup he was fascinated by.
I remember having lots of conversations with him about that.
So, sad to have lost yet another friend.
You folks have any memories you'd like to share?
Certainly.
I mean, Cheshire was, before I'd met him, of course, I knew who he was.
I was a phone freak back in my day, and he was one of the legends of that.
And when I finally got to meet him and hang with him, it was in 2000,
and I was at my first Hope, and we had the chance to chat for a while.
And I pulled up, so I could post around,
I pulled up a photo of myself and him in 2000,
and another photo of myself and him when he was performing at Hackers Got Talent,
the very first time we did that at Hope in 2016.
And it's kind of amazing how he always kind of looked the exact same age
over the course of decades.
And he just had such a spark and a humor to him,
and you could speak with him about minutia for ages,
and it was always just a real good time.
And his absence is going to be sorely felt, I think,
at Hopes and other Hacker events, and, of course, Space events forevermore.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, sure.
Similar to Rob, I mean, I feel like I knew Cheshire before I met him,
in a sense because I had read the book The Hacker Crackdown
that Bruce Sterling wrote way before I had met Cheshire,
had the opportunity to meet him, or maybe it was way before,
maybe it was a couple of years before, maybe a year or two before.
But I read about TAP Magazine, and I knew who Cheshire Catalyst was,
and I remember when I first laid eyes on him and met him,
and it was at the first Hope in 1994, and I was a teenager.
I was, I believe, 15 years old, and I remember thinking,
oh, my God, it's Cheshire Catalyst. That's so cool.
It's like he was a legend back then, and he's been a legend for so many decades,
and he was so approachable and such a great guy.
I wouldn't say I was particularly close to him,
but we would talk and hang out and chat at all of the conferences.
I thought he was a great human being, a fantastic person.
I loved hearing his stories. I loved hearing him talk.
And he played such, I think, almost like an anchoring role
in the community for so long.
And I think you're exactly right, though, Rob, that I think he always looked the same.
I remember him back in 1994 looking exactly like he did last year.
So that's a pretty funny observation about Cheshire.
And, Emanuel, I'm wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about
how you met him and, in particular, his relevance to the—
it was, of course, one of Cheshire's favorite stories
that he would tell no matter how many times you heard it.
It was the origin of the 3-2-1 area code.
Well, I know he gave a talk about that, about getting the 3-2—
in fact, you can find a talk of Cheshire's at every conference except for the virtual one.
But the first time I met him, you know, I'm not sure exactly when the first time was.
I know there was an event in New York City called Telepub 86 in 1986
where he was there to explain the future of TAP Magazine.
Now, TAP Magazine hadn't been published since 1983,
the year before 2600 started back in 1984.
And there was always speculation that TAP was going to come back someday.
And in 1986, that kind of reached a crescendo
when these people known as the Wacko Cracko Brothers—
I'm not making this up—
announced that they had taken over TAP Magazine
and were going to start publishing it.
So Cheshire, I believe, coordinated this conference in New York City.
I think it was at the Best Western Hotel, wherever that was sometime,
I think in the 50s somewhere.
And a bunch of people in the hacker world showed up.
You know, back then a bunch was 20 or 30.
And that's where I first met a lot of people that I still am friends with up to this day.
That might have been the first time I met Cheshire.
And he was there to address the crowd
and announce that TAP was definitely not coming back under his guidance.
He had not actually put out an issue since he became editor,
but he was a writer before.
And the Wacko Cracko Brothers never showed up.
So that didn't work out.
And I don't believe—
I think there were some attempts to relaunch TAP,
but for the most part it kind of ended back in 83.
But Cheshire just had this kind of charming quality to him
where he could take a crazy situation like a bunch of people
wanting to know when they were going to get the rest of their subscription
to just basically winning them over,
even though he wasn't going to give them anything in return
because the magazine was finished.
He always had stories to tell, you know.
And always had interest in things.
And it was very wide and diverse and never boring.
He always gave so much.
I knew him particularly after my first visit to Hope,
Hope No. 6, becoming a volunteer.
And he was a consummate volunteer, but he's also a speaker.
And I knew a little bit of some of the lore around TAP,
but not that much.
Mostly just through some of his talks,
recounting the story and the story of telling the story
instead of continuing to produce it.
I know he was always willing to step in
and just do whatever he could in moments noticed,
if something needed doing.
And was just approachable
and would talk about anything,
and really just could access an old story
or relate to a situation that was happening in front of us
or help organize and keep a bunch of people safe
if we were doing some kind of loading for setup and stuff.
I just got to know him chiefly through those interactions
where you're working with hackers, you know,
elbow to elbow on making an event.
He had that commanding voice that would make you listen
if something had to be announced.
Even if it wasn't the right exact solution to the situation.
Yeah, but he got your attention.
The very first conference in August 1994, Hotel Pennsylvania,
we were on the 18th floor,
and the registration system had completely fallen apart
because we were thinking we were going to use a Mac
to print everybody's picture
and realized that each picture would take about five minutes to print.
So he had to take charge of the situation
and just basically shout out to everybody
that this is how it's going to work.
Give money to the strange Dutch guy
that was standing there with a paper bag
and you would get something to tie around your neck
or arm or whatever.
But he was able to corral people into organization
where there was chaos before.
Gila, do you have any memories of Cheshire?
I mean, I do.
I obviously, not obviously,
but I knew him for less time than anybody else.
I met him for the first time at the 11th Hope in 2016.
And I just remember meeting him
and just immediately being struck with just how cool he was.
And yeah, utterly timeless.
I did a little searching,
a little sleuthing after he passed away
and found his high school graduation picture is online.
Oh my goodness.
How did you do that?
Wow.
He looked the same.
He was 18.
He looked the same.
Did he have the beard then?
Full beard, 18.
Oh my goodness.
Wow.
That is something.
You have to share that with me.
Absolutely.
It was just magical.
But he was ageless.
He was timeless.
It's weird, even for someone I didn't know well
or for a very long time,
this world without him in it feels strange
because, again, just a timeless presence.
Wow.
Go ahead, Rob.
And another thing about him is he was always,
and as you said about his booming voice
and his willingness to throw in,
I know over the years I've been going to Hope,
he had pitched in with everything
from setting up and striking chairs
to he helped me tape up signs to the walls
and things like that
and whatever else came up during the conference.
But another thing he did,
and this would probably be the last circumstances
under which I had seen him,
Gila and I got COVID during the previous Hope,
so we weren't able to go last year.
But during lockdown,
when the 2600 meetings stopped happening in person
and I had set up video conference substitutes
for a virtual meeting for the New York City crowd
and he pinged me and wanted an invite to those.
So I kept him on the list
and he attended the virtual New York City 2600 meetings
for quite a long time
and was a regular on there
and was always just really nice to everybody.
There would be people surprised by his presence
and kind of like, what's he doing here?
Is it okay?
But he was always just very friendly,
very welcoming,
a very warm and dare I say cuddly presence
to just have there.
And yeah, it leaves a heck of a gap.
There's not gonna be another like him.
No, no, for sure.
And also, I just remembered this too,
back at the Fifth Hope 2004,
he was key in getting Steve Wozniak to speak
at our conference,
which was an amazing accomplishment,
something we didn't think was even possible,
but he had connections and he used them
and he actually, he made it happen.
It's almost an incredible thing.
And he never bragged about that either.
He was also always working on stuff,
optimizing, making things accessible,
using whatever devices were maybe past there,
not as popular, but still useful.
He wanted to make sure that like schedules
and things were really portable.
So he would always make sure there was like a Moby site.
I know he hosted a couple of those
and he was always engineering,
coming up with ways, different ways to do things,
ways that some people might want the option to do.
He's really passionate about that.
And it was always kind of around making information
formatted in a way that older technology
might be able to use
or that stuff that people liked the way it worked
could continue to get something out of it,
to get current information over like,
whether it's 3G or whatever kind of protocols
were sort of there, but unused and underappreciated.
He was big on using low bandwidth to get full access,
whether that's using links
or something over a broadcast radio.
Exactly, totally.
Yeah, pared down minimalist,
like just the bare bones information.
And then that way it could be put onto very small screens
or monochrome, certain displays.
And it was, I just love that,
that may not be something everybody else cares about,
but it was something he cared about and it didn't matter.
He still wanted to spread the word about it.
And I think that can be applied
to so many of us in different ways.
We have passions,
we have things that concern us
that maybe we know other people don't care about.
I don't know.
I think you hit the nail on the head there
because just because you might be the only person
who takes an interest in something
doesn't make it any less important.
And that's something that I think
the hacker community understands.
He was somebody that was into this low bandwidth solution
to various things.
He hosted the Titusville, Florida, 2600 meetings.
Oftentimes he was the only person there.
But we still would continue to list those meetings
because they were important
and they were a doorway to have other people
possibly cross paths.
He also was big into, what's it called?
What three words,
where you use three words
to describe a geographical location.
He wanted to use that for everything.
He wanted to use that for every single 2600 meeting.
He wrote an article recently about emojis,
different emojis for different launches,
which was in his area in Florida.
Yeah, there was always something new, always something.
Rob, did you have something else?
Yeah, just talking about what you were saying
about the low bandwidth versions of websites.
Not everyone listening might be aware,
but this is pre-smartphone.
When we had flip phones with small screens on them
and some of them were just beginning to get
very rudimentary web browsers
that most full-featured websites,
your little phone web browser,
wouldn't be able to make much sense of it.
But he was pushing to have people
put up accessible versions of their sites
that could be brought up on these phones.
And that became less and less of an immediate concern
in the smartphone era and everything else.
But that was his thing.
And at the time, it was very important.
And yeah, he was the one banging that drum.
It was an important drum.
It certainly was.
Before we move on, when we found out about this,
we found out about it through a newspaper
in Titusville, Florida, where he lived.
And the interesting thing about that was that
they were heralding him for all his accomplishments
and who he was and what he represented to people.
Not one bit about the hacker connection,
because he was so much more than just that.
We know him for so much in the hacker community.
But there, they knew him for all the other things
he was doing, for being into space travel
and just the various things he would do
around his community.
So he was valued, he was loved in many, many places.
So it's a tremendous loss, tremendous.
We must move on, though.
And we have more things to discuss.
Rob, go ahead.
I do want to point out, we've had word from a couple
of listeners, and I've just verified this.
WBAI's website is down at the moment.
So people who would normally be listening to us that way,
I think, are probably finding themselves unable.
But we're looking into it.
I've been in touch with Reggie at the station.
And so we're going to see what we can do
about all of that.
So the only people that can hear us are people
listening over the radio, just like it used to be in 1988.
So maybe that's something from Cheshire,
just putting it back to the way it was.
I have to get some positivity out of this.
Okay, so the website's down.
We can't really tell people the website's down, can we?
Because, I mean, we can tell people over the radio,
but we can't tell people on, I mean, maybe we can tweet
about it or something.
Does anybody have access to that thing?
Yes.
We're keeping an eye on the Twitter and the Mastodon,
and we're putting the word out as well as we can that way.
Look at it this way.
Since you can't call in during this hour,
that means that you can just listen later.
It's going to be exactly the same as if you're listening now.
It just will be a different time.
Overtime starts at 8 o'clock.
You can call into that.
You can be part of a chat.
That is something that will go on regardless of the state
of WBAI's website, because it's on YouTube.
And you can go to 2600.com,
and the link is right there at the top of the page.
And we look forward to seeing and hearing from you there.
Yes.
And a listener known as Fun Socks did let us know over Twitter
that there's another site called Radio Station USA FM,
and you can find WBAI on there and listen to it that way.
Well, you could probably command your Alexa device to say,
play WBAI.
And for some reason, you'll hear two minutes of commercials,
which are really annoying.
But after that finishes, you'll actually hear us.
So I guess this only affects people who are going to WBAI.org
and listening that way.
Okay, enough about that.
Yeah.
So, oh, by the way, one other thing.
Is it possible to paste pictures in the chat that we have
on the overtime YouTube chat?
Does anybody know?
I don't know, but I will find out.
If it's possible.
You can tell how often I use this.
If it's possible, please paste the picture of Cheshire at 18.
I think people would love to see that,
and it would be a tremendous draw, too.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Hey, so today's a big deal.
Trump's Twitter account.
Yeah.
So apparently the special counsel got a search warrant
for Twitter to turn over Trump's account.
Yeah.
Special counsel Jack Smith's team obtained a search warrant back in January
for records related to former President Donald Trump's Twitter account.
And guess what?
Elon Musk and Twitter didn't really cooperate.
They didn't really work in an expeditious way
and wound up being fined $350,000 as a result for missing the deadline to comply.
Yeah.
These details were included in a ruling from the federal appeals court in Washington
over a legal battle surrounding the warrant that has played out under seal for months.
The court rejected Twitter's claim that it should not have been held in contempt or sanctioned.
I think Twitter should always be held in contempt and sanctioned, but whatever.
Smith's team repeatedly mentioned Trump's tweets in an indictment unsealed last week
that charges the former president with conspiring to subvert the will of voters
and cling to power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.
It's fascinating watching all this play out.
No matter what case you pick, this is probably the most interesting case.
But seeing that, yeah, they're now going to have access.
Maybe, Alex, maybe you could tell us what will they have access to now?
I imagine direct messaging, DMs, other things that you might not see publicly?
Yeah, absolutely.
They're going to have access to a lot of information that we wouldn't see publicly.
They're going to have access to his IP address.
They're going to have access to the device information about when he made certain tweets
so that you could tie, perhaps, his device back to a certain tweet at a certain time
at a certain location.
They're going to have access to whatever they ask for, frankly, in the subpoena itself.
Even things like login dates and times.
Twitter is tricky like this, though, in terms of how they produce it.
I've actually litigated with Twitter over this exact issue.
And I find it really fascinating.
Remember, I've been on a plane all day, so I'm catching up on a lot of news right now.
This was actually news to me.
But I'll tell you, I have a case right now that involves an activist in the Hasidic community
in Brooklyn who was being defamed on Twitter in a coordinated way to try to assassinate
his character because he was doing things like helping children in the Hasidic community
obtain secular education and helping victims of domestic violence, that kind of thing.
So we had subpoenaed Twitter.
We had filed an action in the Eastern District of New York and got the right to serve third-party discovery
on Twitter to identify the persons behind these accounts that were part of the coordinated
and concerted effort to assassinate our client's character.
And Twitter refused to comply.
It was really fascinating.
And this must have been playing out right around the same time that the Department of Justice
was litigating with Twitter.
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out why they were holding on to this data
and fighting us tooth and nail to prevent us from getting it.
So they really put us through the wringer.
So Twitter has an office in Manhattan.
We filed the case in Brooklyn because our client lives in Brooklyn.
And Twitter said, well, through their counsel, they told us that,
well, we don't think you have jurisdiction in Brooklyn.
In fact, we don't think any federal court in the United States has jurisdiction over Twitter
except the Northern District of California, where Twitter has its headquarters.
Because of the rules of discovery and Twitter was a third party,
if we wanted to force them to comply with the subpoena that our judge in Brooklyn so ordered,
we had to go and file an entirely new lawsuit in the Northern District of California,
a miscellaneous action to compel Twitter to comply with the subpoena.
And we did.
And the rules change when you go to the Northern District of California.
There's much more—I wouldn't say respect, but that's the wrong word.
I would say that there's much more support for anonymous speech in California than there is in New York.
We'd be able to secure anonymity very easily with a defamation claim in New York.
It's a bit harder in California.
So the rules are in their favor.
And when you look at the history of these motions that are made there,
Twitter really never loses.
So it was quite an uphill battle for us to fight them on their own turf.
But we fought them on their own turf, and we won.
We actually convinced the judge in the Northern District of California to give us the data.
When they finally gave us the data, there wasn't a lot—
there was a lot of it that we believed should have been there but was missing.
And I think that the Department of Justice will probably find the same thing,
that the login dates and times probably aren't there because of the way that Twitter login sessions work.
They're very persistent.
You don't log in and out all the time.
So they won't get a lot of that data, but they will get a lot of other information about Trump,
his account, the activities, when it was active, when it wasn't active.
But I bet you, Emanuel and company, that the reason why we might have faced such an uphill battle
was because they changed their policy perhaps just to fight Trump,
just to fight for Trump and to try to prevent his data from going over to the Department of Justice.
It must have been going on around the same time,
and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was such a tooth-and-nail battle
because in the past, I had subpoenaed Twitter from the Eastern District of New York
and gotten information right away.
Well, you know, one major change in Twitter is, of course, who owns it now.
And I think that is when the attitude sort of changed.
Listen to this. This is fascinating.
And by the way, Alex, if it's possible, could you stay in one place?
Because when you move, your microphone changes the way it sounds dramatically.
It's entertaining, but it might be also a little annoying to some people.
You seem to be running errands or something over there in Vegas. Are you?
I'm just a peripatetic philosopher here.
Okay. Well, anyway, the court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump
could jeopardize the ongoing investigation by giving him an opportunity to destroy evidence
or change patterns of behavior.
Hard as that might be to believe.
Or maybe even notify people that his Twitter account was being searched.
I can't imagine that. Can anyone imagine that?
So basically, the filing Twitter objected to,
which basically they said four days after the compliance deadline,
they would not produce any of the account information.
According to the judges, Twitter did not question the validity of the search warrant,
but argued that the nondisclosure agreement violated its First Amendment right
to communicate with Trump.
Now, that's just a bizarre statement right there.
And it strikes me that they wouldn't do this for anybody else.
And it feels like they're, or if it's Elon Musk doing this,
he is just trying to protect him.
So Twitter said if it had to turn over the records
before the judge assessed the legality of the nondisclosure agreement,
it would prevent Trump from asserting executive privilege
to shield communications made using his Twitter account.
It's pretty incredible, unbelievable that they went to these lengths.
I tend to agree there.
I think it's fascinating that they went to these lengths.
I think maybe there is some validity that Trump should have the opportunity
to assert some kind of privilege before the documents are produced.
That seems to be customary that you would give notice.
But the non-notice provision of the warrant definitely makes sense
in this context as well.
I mean, Trump is known to move around documents into showers
and bathrooms and warehouses and various things.
And also it seems to me that the warrant would also be seeking
his direct messages, the communications with other people.
And that's something that would not be available to a litigant
in a civil suit because of something called the Stored Communications Act.
You're not allowed to access content like that.
But essentially it's kind of like a wiretap or something,
something for which you would need a warrant,
and that's what the government has.
I think you're right.
I think they're bending it over backwards for him.
The argument that this would somehow violate Twitter's First Amendment rights
to communicate with Trump, I would love to see the briefing on that
because that just seems very odd.
Yeah, and it's also very similar to hearing Trump threaten the lives
of judges and prosecutors and then say,
oh, it's just my First Amendment right.
It's the same type of thinking.
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I mean, if you have a First Amendment right,
and then you consider corporations to freely associate and speak with others,
I don't see how a warrant would violate that.
It might invade the privacy of that communication,
but a warrant issues upon probable cause and from the judiciary.
It's not something that just happens as a matter of course all the time.
So there's judicial oversight of this.
I find it a very odd argument, and it seems like there might have been
perhaps some kind of special relationship between the platform and Trump.
I just know when my Facebook account was subpoenaed or looked at by the FBI,
I found out about it months later when Facebook,
in what might have even been a mistake, let me know,
but they never explained anything else.
They never said a word about it.
They just referred me to the FBI, and they never said a word either.
So to this day, I have no idea what that was about,
and that's usually how it goes.
It seems here that Twitter was bending over backwards to try and protect Trump,
and that's disturbing.
That's really disturbing.
Especially if the platform and their access to it was a source of evidence.
Totally.
All right, well, we'll find out more, I'm sure,
especially when those DMs get analyzed.
But there are some other election controversies going on.
How about this?
Details of tens of millions of voters could have been accessed by hackers,
okay, that's what they say in this news story,
who targeted the elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission.
This is over in the U.K.
They said there was little risk of hostile actors being able to influence
the outcome of a vote, but apologized for the breach in its systems.
The hack, which was publicly confirmed yesterday,
allowed the attackers to access reference copies of electoral registers
containing the names and addresses of people registered to vote
between 2014 and 2022.
So to me, that says that whoever did this
had access to private information for anybody who voted in the United Kingdom.
I don't see any other way to read this.
But they're trying to spin it in a positive light, saying that,
yeah, there's no risk of the vote being influenced.
Okay, that's not really the point.
The point is that all of this private information is now out there
and was not protected properly.
It's really pretty disturbing.
Now, this is what they said as part of their apology.
While the data contained in the electoral registers is limited
and much of it is already in the public domain,
we understand the concern that may have been caused
by the registers potentially being accessed
and apologized to those affected.
So what they're trying to say is that, yeah, okay,
your name and your address, that's already out there.
Yeah, we're sorry it got accessed through us,
but yeah, you know, someone could have found it anyway.
No, that's not necessarily true.
Many people try to protect their private address,
try to protect, I don't know if their phone numbers were in this as well,
but whatever information was there, you know,
you trust the electoral commission to guard this information.
And when they get hacked, they try and pass it off like it's no big deal
and that the real big deal is that an election wasn't breached.
Okay, well, that's great.
If that's your standard, it's a pretty low bar.
Now, there are parts of this story that I don't understand.
I don't understand how the system works over in the UK.
They say the registers held at the time of the cyber attack
include the name and address of anyone in the UK
who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022,
as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters.
That seems pretty straightforward right there.
The names and addresses of anyone in the UK registered to vote between that time.
But it says they did not include the details of those registered anonymously.
So what does that mean?
You can register to vote anonymously in the UK?
How does that work exactly?
How do they know that you're able to do that if they don't know who you are?
Or is there some kind of a feature where you're able to say,
okay, I'm registered.
Now, hide my information, delete it off your servers.
And if that's the case, if that is a feature,
I think everybody in the UK should take advantage of that feature right now.
And I think this is the reason why.
Yeah, I wonder if it's for VIPs or bureaucrats
some kind of protection.
People that otherwise would be revealed.
So not the commoners like us, in other words.
Yeah, people with all kinds of highfalutin reasons.
It should be across the board how everybody's handled.
It seems very, very odd that you have a tiered system like that.
I want to hear from people in the UK as to how this system works,
because it opens up more questions than it answers.
I really don't know who was compromised.
I mean, it seems like every voter in the UK was compromised here,
except those who are anonymous.
They should all be anonymous.
That is the whole point of voting is to remain anonymous
and not have a database floating around where everybody's private information exists.
In the States, that's the case.
In fact, many times you can get this information just by asking for it.
New York is one of those states.
You can get a list of everybody who's registered to vote,
what party they're registered with, their address.
Some states have even more.
Some states have phone numbers, email addresses.
Some states don't even allow that information to get out.
I think those are the ones that have the right idea.
So it's a really fascinating thing to study.
Okay.
So we've looked into this whole anonymous registry deal.
That was fast.
How did you do it so fast?
Information superhighway, dude.
Okay.
Apparently, there is the electoral register, which is publicly accessible,
and your name and address are on it if you register to vote in the UK.
If you have reason to believe your name and address being on the electoral register
could affect your safety or the safety of someone in your household,
you can register to vote anonymously.
That means you can still vote, but you won't appear on this registry.
So tell me the advantage of being on the registry.
I can't see any advantage unless you really want people to come over
and check out the cool decorations you have in your front yard or something.
However,
If you have a really awful place, maybe.
Sorry.
The requirements that they have to keep,
you have to submit evidence to support your anonymous registration,
like a court document that is for your protection
or the protection of someone in your household or an attestation
where an authorized person signs to your application form
to confirm your safety would be at risk.
Here's the attestation, which is a great word, by the way.
The attestation is this story because everybody who did not do this,
their name and address is now out there in the hands of God knows who.
And so we're looking further into this,
and this appears to be something that is there for the use of people
who have legitimate threats to their safety,
people with sort of orders of protection or stalkers or things like that.
And the people who can give you an attestation are police officers,
directors of social services,
people of that sort who can back up your story that you need the special protection.
Otherwise, the default is to be on the open electoral registry.
All right.
Well, now you see why that's a bad idea.
And yeah, OK.
So that database is being passed around.
Alex, are you ironing or something?
I was ironing a little bit there.
That's got to be a first for this show.
Probably.
But I am paying quite detailed attention.
And that's why I'm chiming in, too,
because I hadn't thought about Rob's point that he just made,
which I think is a really fascinating one,
that registering to vote could be something that's dangerous for a domestic
violence survivor.
It's really, really fascinating.
And I would imagine that we should have some kind of analogous mechanism
whereby we can shield people from the voter rolls in similar circumstances in
the United States.
But, you know, I say we ought to or we should have that.
But I doubt that we do.
It's a really, really good point, I think, that you guys have made there.
And possibly something that could cause a lot of survivors and victims of
domestic violence or sexual abuse to be disenfranchised.
They may not want them knowing that their names and addresses are going to
appear on some public database somewhere.
So it can really discourage people.
It's an interesting topic.
And just because somebody isn't a victim of domestic violence today doesn't
mean they won't be next year.
So are they expected to move?
Because that information is public, because it's out right now.
So I don't think people should wait until their public figures or somebody
in fear for their lives to be protected from having their private information
get out there.
The story was saying that people in the anonymous side of this weren't
affected. So it sounds like this whole event was a great argument for being
anonymous in that particular jurisdiction.
It helps you a great deal.
Or put an address if it's a terrible place.
You just wouldn't wish on anyone to go there.
Well, you can't put a fake address in.
That's probably a crime of some sort.
Well, move to an awful, awful, awful place.
You had a good idea of that.
Go ahead, Gila.
So I was doing a little bit of research.
Apparently there are these anonymous voter programs in Australia, New Zealand
and the U.K.
But in the U.S.
there is an address confidentiality program that goes through Secretary of
State of each individual state.
And they hook you up with a P.O.
box.
Or substitute address.
OK.
And then most states with this program apply it to their voter records.
OK.
It's hoopy.
It's very hoopy.
I mean, think of, you know, when you register an Internet domain.
Now the default is to anonymize it.
It used to be.
And I thought this was a useful service.
You could see who is actually running a particular Web site.
Now you can't do that.
You can't run the who is command and find out where this particular domain
is coming from or who is behind it.
I wish we had the same concern for individuals because that is really who
would be at risk in a situation like this.
Alex.
Yeah.
The domain thing is an interesting analog here, too.
And the reason why you don't ordinarily see who is behind a particular
domain by using the who is command anymore is precisely because of GDPR
in the EU and the data from who is.
This is a really big debate within the ICANN community that ranged from
maybe 2018 or even before that to really even the present day.
But because under the eyes of GDPR, a lot of the data that would be
associated with the domain registry is PII, personally identifiable
information, the name, the address, telephone number, all these types
of things.
So the default for many registrars is to mask that data, to make it
private, to comply with the law in the EU.
But what they don't mask in a lot of the who is data, which people
don't realize, is that everything shows up as GDPR masked or
behind some kind of proxy.
But because GDPR protects people and not corporations or organizations,
you can still very often get the registrant organization from the
who is data.
It'll be hidden amongst all of the other masked data, but you can very
often get that, and that can be really useful information.
But to go back to this issue of the voter rolls, I think what's really
interesting to me is that whoever did this, whatever threat actor was
behind it, I'm not going to call them a hacker like the whatever media
report that was, whoever did this obviously had access to the data,
so the data was no longer confidential.
How can we be so sure it still has its integrity?
How can we be so sure that the data was not tampered with in some
manner?
Because the object of attacking the voter rolls, if you're a
sophisticated cyber adversary or some kind of nation state looking to
perform something like election interference, would ordinarily be to
tamper with those voting rolls.
And if you can tamper with the voting rolls, if you can change people's
names, take people off of them, add people to them, that's how you can
wreak absolute havoc on an election.
So this all seems very suspicious to me, and I think we should be
demanding more.
I think the UK public should be demanding more information about the
forensics surrounding this incident.
Well, we are going to have to leave it there as we reach the end of our
hour.
Unfortunately, I believe the WBII website is still down, so people can't
listen to us through there, but you can listen to us through the archive,
so welcome in the future.
And of course, coming up at 8 o'clock Eastern time, you can join us on
YouTube and just go to the link on the webpage of 2600.com or just go to
channel 2600 on YouTube and you'll find us there.
We're going to go out with something that you guys, Rob and Gila,
referenced before from the conference in 2016 where Cheshire Catalyst,
our dear departed friend, was performing at Hackers Got Talent.
Anything you want to say about this before we begin?
I found out that Cheshire and my dad were contemporaries, and that was
really, I told you guys, my first memory of Cheshire is this performance,
and it reminded me of my dad, and I love the fact that he got up and sang
a Tom Lehrer song.
It's epic.
All right.
Let's listen to that.
You'll hear Jason Scott, our friend Jason Scott, introducing him from
back in 2016.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
We're off next week.
We'll see you in two weeks and hopefully on overtime at 8 o'clock on YouTube.
Good night.
All right, number two.
Let's go for contestant number two.
Are you ready for contestant number two?
We call him the golden voice of Florida.
This, of course, is Cheshire Catalyst, the Cheshire Catalyst,
the Cheshire Catalyst.
Cheshire is not missing tonight.
A legend, and I do love you, man.
You are friggin' awesome.
Thank you.
Okay.
I'm really, yes, I really have taken this opportunity to reveal to the
world an aspect of my area code.
Now, for those who don't know, back in 1999, I went to the Florida
Public Service Commission hearing that was splitting the 407 area code.
I explained to them that Cape Canaveral, the countdown cap of the world,
should, in my humble opinion, get area code 321.
They liked the idea.
The thing is that I had an inspiration, which I didn't realize at the time,
and that was my true hero, Tom Lehrer.
Now, Tom Lehrer used to write funny songs,
and he got to thinking about the nostalgic songs of World War I,
World War II, and, you know,
if we're going to have nostalgic songs about World War III,
we ought to start writing them now.
Well, he did so.
I'm about to sing it for you.
But he left this three-beat pause in the middle of the bridge.
But I have always filled in that bridge myself with my own lyrics,
which I seemed appropriate to the song,
as I would sing it in the shower nearly every day.
So there I am going down the list of area codes.
You know the list.
201 New Jersey, 202 D.C., blah, blah, blah.
Gaps marked available for geographic relief.
Then I see 321.
Why does that sound familiar?
Oh, I live near Cape Canaveral, the countdown capital.
And, of course, that's the area code I took to the Public Service Commission.
Well, let me see now.
Let's start it up and see how it goes.
Okay, so officially it is Cheshire Catalyst sings Tom Lehrer's So Long, Mom.
Hang on.
Sorry about that.
It's in beta.
Shut up.
That was a short song.
When has streaming music ever worked for you?
So long, mom.
I'm off to drop the bomb.
So don't wait up for me.
But while you swelter down there in your shelter,
you can see me on your TV.
While we're attacking frontally, watchbrinkally and huntally,
describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost.
No need for you to miss a minute of the agonizing Holocaust.
Oh, yeah.
Little Johnny Jones, he was a U.S. pilot.
And no shrinking violet was he.
3, 2, 1.
He was mighty proud when World War III was declared.
He wasn't scared, no siree.
And this is what he said on his way to Armageddon.
So long, mom.
I'm off to drop the bomb.
So don't wait up for me.
But though I may roam, I'll come back to my home.
Although it may be a pile of debris.
Remember, mommy, I'm off to get a commie.
Send me a salami and try to smell some how.
I'll look for you when the war is over.
An hour and a half from now.
Wait, wait, wait.
Come back up here.
Come back up here.
Amazing, amazing, amazing.
And now you see where the 3, 2, 1 came from.
He waited 11 hopes to show this talent.
Josh, come back up here.
We're not done with you.
Wow.
Get your patch.
Get your patch.
Yes.
Yep.
Hope Land Security has the best freedom fondle in the business.
All right.
And I believe have our judges assembled their scores for the Cheshire Catalyst performance of Tom Lehrer's
So long, mom.
I'm off to drop the bomb.