And this is WBAI New York, 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online.
The previous program was Economic Update with the professor Richard Wolff, heard Wednesdays
at 6.30 p.m.
It is now 7 p.m.
Stay tuned for Off The Hook coming up.
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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.
How are you doing?
We have Rob T. Firefly out there in Skypland.
Good evening.
We also have Gila out there in Skypland.
Good evening.
And we have Alex also in Skypland.
You do indeed.
Good evening.
How are you, Alex?
I have been better.
Thanks for asking.
Yeah.
Well, I can't help but ask.
I mean, the people at home can't see this, but my goodness, you made rather merry over
the holidays, apparently.
What happened?
That's one way to put it.
Yeah.
You went to Florida, I understand?
I'm laid up here.
But you went to Florida?
Yeah, I guess.
Oh, no, Alex, we've warned you, we've told you so many times, don't go to Florida, especially
over the holidays.
Okay, so tell us what happened.
Well, I'm laid up right now.
I'll start with the results.
I've got a leg that's broken in a few places.
I've got some pins going through my leg, holding it together, three different metal rods, an
X fixature, as it's called, holding my leg together, and I'll have another surgery.
So that was one surgery to kind of put this humpy-dumpy type thing back together, and
then another one tomorrow to hopefully finish the job.
So wish me luck.
But how this all started, how I got here, is really interesting.
It actually has to do with batteries, believe it or not.
Well, that's certainly a relevant topic for a hacker show, because a lot of things are
powered by batteries these days.
We see them more and more.
I just didn't know they could hurt you so much.
Well, they usually don't, right?
They usually don't.
But this was a new battery that was installed in my mother's golf cart.
As many people know too, I was down in Florida.
It's been a bit of a rough time for my family, and I'll set the stage with you for a second
because I'm down in Florida.
My mother was in the hospital for a while, and then she came out maybe about a week and
a half ago.
Then my stepfather had to go into the hospital, and the day that this all happened, I had
picked him up and took him home from the hospital about 10 minutes before this all happened.
Maybe 10 minutes after I dropped him off, I got dressed to go to the pool with the
kids, and my 10-year-old son wanted to drive the golf cart because he loves driving the
golf cart.
Quite frankly, he's been driving it for many years.
He probably shouldn't, but we usually let him drive the golf cart.
My mother had informed us that she put this new battery into the golf cart, and it was
a brand new battery.
You could floor this golf cart and take any turn that you wanted, and it really wasn't
going to create that much torque because the old battery didn't have as much power.
As we got to where the pool was, there was another golf cart coming towards us from the
opposite lane, and my son went to make the left-hand turn into the area that had the
pool.
He was concerned about the other cart coming, so he stepped on it.
He made the turn, and by the way, this has got to be somewhat of my fault, too, because
I was encouraging him to go a little bit faster earlier on down the street, but I didn't know
he was going to make this turn so quickly.
I had my other son, my five-year-old son, on my lap as this happened, so he makes this
turn that was usually fine to make in the golf cart with the old battery, but with the
new battery, there was so much force from the golf cart that the five-year-old and I
went flying out of it, out of the golf cart.
We were literally ejected from the golf cart, and he's in my arms, so I had to protect my
five-year-old, so I did.
He has quite literally two scratches on him, and I don't know how I managed that, but I
wound up completely breaking my foot.
I broke the fibula, the tibula, and the ankle, and my foot was basically facing in a direction
that it shouldn't have been facing.
It was kind of tilted all the way over to the right, and my ten-year-old son saw this.
He started freaking out.
He said, �Please go inside, get somebody to call an ambulance.� I tried to keep it
together for him as much as I possibly could, and I did.
He was very helpful.
He put his back against my back, so I had something to lean up against until the ambulance
came.
I'll tell you, Emanuel, it was tough because it took a long time to get him off the ledge
of, �This is all his fault.
This is my fault.
I hurt my daddy.� It wasn't his fault.
If anybody's fault, it was mine.
I shouldn't have been encouraging him to go a little faster earlier on the street, or
I should have driven the golf cart first with the new battery.
You just don't think something this crazy is going to happen so quickly, but it does.
I think that's why we call it an accident.
Finally, he's come down off that and realized it's not his fault, it's an accident.
It's something I'm going to have to deal with for the next two months, probably.
It hasn't been fun, I'll put it that way, especially when you live in a walk-up in Manhattan.
I live in a fourth floor walk-up in the village, so that's not going to be my friend.
I'll probably be spending a lot more time out in Pennsylvania over the next month and
a half or so, but it will put a damper on.
I start teaching again at King's College in London at the law faculty in January.
I don't think I'm going to be able to go in person in January.
My trips back and forth to London will probably start in February this year.
But thank God we're all otherwise all right.
This could have been a lot worse.
Thank God the five-year-old is okay.
But what a way to end the year.
The year is not over yet, Alex.
That was just Christmas time, so you still have another week, so be careful.
That's absolutely right.
I guess they don't have seatbelts in golf carts.
It's a good idea.
I don't know who's in charge of these things, but you can certainly get hurt.
This is just some kind of routine thing that we do all the time, this five-minute trip
to the pool.
I also will tell you I was very reluctant to go to the pool that day.
There's something nagging me almost like a premonition about going to the pool, but I
thought it was because it really wasn't cool weather.
It was maybe 65 degrees.
It was a little chilly.
You know how kids are.
They just want to go to the pool.
They don't care how cold or how warm it is.
They just want to be in the water.
So I was just trying to be a good dad, and this happened.
You should update your sense of foreboding because it wasn't the pool that was the problem.
It was the ride to the pool that was the problem, and that's what you should have been wary
of.
That's true.
I'm glad to hear you're on the mend, but boy, that's something nobody needs, and you weren't
even playing golf either.
Just everyone rides around on those things down there.
No, I wasn't drinking.
People here, it was a golf cart accident.
But now everyone in the family has been to the hospital, right?
So we all have something to talk about.
Just about.
I will tell you this, too.
Because my foot was facing the wrong way, when I got to the hospital, they had to reset
it and place it back into that spot, but so to do that, they had to give me a lot of drugs.
They didn't want to knock me out entirely and do it.
They wanted me to be somewhat awake, but also not able to remember or feel this.
So they gave me a massive amount of propofol.
According to them, apparently I have a very high drug tolerance, so I was still having
conversations with them after they pumped me full of this propofol.
So then on top of that, they had to give me a dose of ketamine, and that was when I tell
you, I'm not one for LSD and those kinds of extracurricular activities, so to speak, but
I went on a wild trip.
I was on an incredible trip.
Once they gave me that ketamine, I felt like I was with my kids, and we were in a mining
cart, and this mining cart went down on these tracks, but the tracks led into the heavens,
and we were going through the galaxy, and then the colors were changing, and it was
pink, and it was white, and then pinkish white, but we were always in this mining cart together.
It was really, really weird.
I've never experienced anything like that.
I had this great feeling of euphoria afterwards as well, that we went on this amazing trip
together, and then as the drugs wore off, it quickly dawned on me that I'd be dealing
with this for the next two, two and a half months or so, and the logistics of it were
a nightmare, but that was an experience, let me tell you, absolutely.
Well, you know, we had a more quiet time, not the adventures that you always somehow
embark upon, but again, happy to see that you're on the mend.
It's going to take a while, Kyle.
I know you've been through this when you broke your hand up in Ontario.
That was a pain after delivering all the dogs with our friend Greg.
It's a couple of months in your life that change, right?
Yeah, it'll heal to be just as strong as it ever was.
That's the amazing thing, that it'll do that.
It'll just heal.
Well, it is, right?
I mean, I'm going to put you that Hemingway quote, right, where he says, the world breaks
everyone, but many are strong in the broken places, meaning that when things break, they
grow back stronger, right?
But then the next part of that quote, I believe, is, with those that doesn't break, it kills,
right?
It kills the very good, it kills the very kind, and something about it will ultimately
kill you too.
Well, he had his dark side, you know, so there's always that.
Rob Gila, did you have anything?
Just that, I'm sorry we got you a soccer ball for Christmas, but we'll give you the receipt
too, so you can exchange it.
Yeah, that's unfortunate.
And the big race, the big race, Alex, in February, how are you going to train for that?
You know, you're a long-distance runner, I'm kidding, he's not a long-distance runner.
He can sit at home for a long time.
I was just going to ask if you'll let us sign your cast.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, I was thinking, we should figure out a way to all get together and maybe do
the show in person at some point soon, because there's some restaurants over near WBAI in
Brooklyn that I'd love to go and check out.
I thought you were going to get us to all come to your house to do the show, because
you can't move.
I thought that's what was the angle of this.
I'm always dubious of these ideas, but yeah, that's a good idea.
We can all sign your cast.
You know, maybe we can make this a BAI premium, where people can sign your cast.
I'm always thinking of ways to raise money for the station, but you know, we were off
last week for an emergency fundraiser, we're off next week, I believe, for a planned fundraiser,
so we're kind of the show that's wedged between fundraisers.
And I'm not entirely sure if we're still preempted next week, I think we are.
So let me just say for the station, 212-209-2950 is the number to call to pledge, which I think
is working.
And if not, or in addition, give to WBAI.org, give the number to WBAI.org to pledge whatever
you can to the station.
Remember, it's the end of the year, and we're a non-profit, so there's a whole thing where
people like to donate lots of money to non-profits at the end of the year, and we're the best
one I think you can think of, or that we can think of anyway.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, I would just like to echo that.
I think it's a fantastic way to spend some of that end of year money and decrease your
taxable income.
It's, you know, definitely a worthy cause, and you wouldn't hear this kind of chatter
anywhere else.
Well, you might, but it wouldn't be as interesting, I don't think.
Go ahead, Gayla.
But, yes, to put on my professional hat for a second, yes, end of year, get your tax deductions.
If your employer matches your charitable contributions, WBAI is a great choice.
If you're over 73 and you have not made your required minimum distributions this year,
charitable giving is a great way to do it.
If you have money you have to spend by Sunday because you have to from your IRA, think about
giving it to WBAI, and if you do, or if you want to become a BAI buddy, please do that
in the name of Off The Hook.
Let them know that we told you to do this.
It works out well for everybody.
But, yes, the more you can do by December 31st, the better it looks on your taxes.
And a programming reminder, overtime, as always, we'll start at 8 o'clock on YouTube where
you can interact with us, and I know, Alex, you have an operation for tomorrow morning
at 6.
Hopefully, you can spend a few minutes with us in overtime just to receive the goodwill
of our many listeners who view us there or listen to us there.
That sounds good.
I'll hang out for a little bit and then I'll peel off, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes in.
Okay.
All right, let's cover some stories relating to the world of technology and computers and
things like that.
Although, you know, golf carts with new batteries certainly does qualify.
Electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles, yeah.
Beware, beware.
Well, just put your damn seatbelt on.
If you don't have a seatbelt, make sure there is one.
Maybe not have 10-year-olds drive, too.
That's another issue I would lecture you about.
Yeah.
It could happen to anybody, though.
Hindsight.
You're driving probably the same thing.
You probably would have been flung further, you know, because it's...
You're probably right.
Yeah.
So...
If I were driving and I had, you know, the kids would have flown out.
That's right.
I would have been dead.
That would have been bad.
It would have been a different conversation.
Okay.
So there is this story that's been circulating, I would dare say trending, about this teen
hacker.
You might know him as the Grand Theft Auto hacker or the Rockstar Games hacker, because
he keeps hacking them for one reason or another.
The story, you know, that happens all the time, apparently.
I don't know why it happens all the time, but it just does.
He has been sentenced to life in a secure hospital.
That is what the headline in this story on The Verge read.
I'm going to read you how it begins, and we can assess it from this point.
The 18-year-old...
I believe I'm pronouncing this right.
The hacker group is called Lapsus, but the last S is a dollar sign, so I think that's
how you pronounce it.
If not, somebody correct me.
The 18-year-old Lapsus hacker, who played a critical role in leaking Grand Theft Auto
6 footage, has been sentenced to life inside a hospital prison.
That's according to a report from the BBC.
A British judge ruled on Thursday that Arianne Cottage is a high risk to the public because
he still wants to commit cyber crimes.
Wow.
I've never heard anything stretched so much as that.
Because he wants to commit cyber crimes, life in prison.
In August, a London jury found that Cottage carried out cyber attacks against Grand Theft
Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games and other companies, including Uber and NVIDIA.
However, since Cottage has autism and was deemed unfit to stand trial, the jury was
asked to determine whether he committed the acts in question, not whether he did so with
criminal intent.
During a recent hearing, the court heard Cottage had been violent while in custody, with dozens
of reports of injury or property damage.
That's according to the BBC.
A mental health assessment also found that Cottage continued to express the intent to
return to cyber crime as soon as possible.
He's required to stay in the hospital prison for life unless doctors determine he's no
longer a danger.
A rather big if there, but basically what he's alleged to have done is leaked 90 videos
of Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay footage last September.
Now, he was out on bail and under police protection.
I'm not sure of protection from who.
He was, let's say, police guard during this time, but even without his laptop, he was
able to hack Rockstar Games by using the hotel rooms included Amazon Fire Stick and
a newly purchased smartphone, keyboard, and mouse.
He was able to hack them with just that.
Apparently, that outraged everybody so much that they're really out for blood here.
I cannot think of any instance where even the specter of life imprisonment in any form
is justified.
And yeah, okay, he got violent and caused property damage while imprisoned.
I don't know if any of us have been in prison for a long period of time.
I was locked up for a couple of days during the RNC in New York, and I got to tell you,
my mind was different than when I went in, and it would have been way more different
the more time goes by.
Locking people up has an effect, so I cannot look at that and say, oh my God, that's an
unforgivable act, what he did by engaging in property damage while being confined.
It almost seems like a human reaction.
Alex, any thoughts on this as far as a legal perspective, locking somebody up for life,
for hacking into a video game?
And I don't mean to dismiss it.
I don't mean to say that it doesn't matter, that this is just a video game, but people
are still buying the game.
The company is still doing well.
They're getting a lot of publicity.
They probably should beef up their security, because this seems to happen all the time,
but this kid is just obsessed, and people do get obsessed.
I think you're right.
I think it is an obsession, and I think obsession does seem to be the right way of looking at
this, because it seems to be more of a psychiatric type of sentence than something that actually
sounds in the criminal law.
As a matter of criminal law, this would be wildly disproportionate to the offenses at
issue, even if he intended to commit the offenses over and over and over again, that probably
would not justify some kind of life imprisonment here.
It seems to me that the sentence here is custodial in nature almost entirely because of the psychological
angle to the crime here and that the offender does not seem to be able to help himself in
some other way.
It's almost like some kind of irresistible impulse to continue to break the law.
With that in mind, a judge could say, ìLook, I'm going to sentence you to some kind of
psychiatric hospital for the foreseeable future, only if you can demonstrate that you're no
longer a threat to society, are you going to be able to get out of that psychiatric
hospital?î It's like involuntarily imprisoning somebody on the basis of their psychology
and assuming for the moment or for the next several decades on behalf of this person that
there's nothing that can be done, that there's no diversion that this person can go through,
that he has no other redeeming social qualities, and that's what I think really hits me in
the heart here.
It's about this person who's obviously extraordinarily smart, probably very, very talented when it
comes to identifying vulnerabilities, and here is this person going to be wasting away
in a psychiatric hospital in misery for the foreseeable future.
It seems to me like even if this was somebody who said, ìI'm going to continually punch
people in the face, commit some kind of physical crime, and I intend to do this again and again,
and again and again,î I don't think it would justify the same type of disproportionate
response.
I think we would say, ìYou've got a problem.
You need to have some kind of treatment,î and that's it.
It wouldn't be this life sentence.
Alex, if somebody is actually going out there punching people in the face, they are a physical
threat and they should be kept away from people that they could hurt.
We're talking about somebody who released videos, and not only he didn't release the
game, he released clips of the upcoming game.
The game is still coming out.
The game is still doing well, I believe.
The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 was released, and that had 128 million views in just four
days.
They're claiming it cost them $5 million to recover.
I'm not sure what they're recovering from.
The game itself wasn't released.
I know it's a crime.
I know it's illegal, but it's a different kind of crime than doing something violent
or burning down a building or something like that.
This is someone who sees a challenge, and yeah, he's misguided in the way that he tackles
that challenge, but boy, maybe not make it so easy for him.
Wasn't it the case that he was found to be unfit to stand trial?
This is entirely a sentence that has been meted out on the basis of the psychological
makeup of the offender.
That was really the point that I was trying to portray here, is that there seems to be
this assumption that this person is beyond some kind of rehabilitation here and needs
to be locked away from society.
I think you're right too, Manuel, to look at the damages and to question them.
However, I bet $5 million is probably a bit accurate.
Any kind of breach winds up costing companies millions of dollars these days.
You have to do forensics, there's an investigation, there's lots of legal fees, notification
to customers, regulatory authorities, all this kind of stuff gets really expensive really
quickly, so that's quite possible.
This reminds me of a lot of the trumped up damages charges that people like Kevin Mitnick
faced when it came to, I think it was Novell, where Novell had claimed that he managed to
exfiltrate or steal the source code that was worth, I don't even remember what the numbers
were, but it was so incredibly inflated that it just didn't sound in reality.
I think this type of decision is hiding behind the laws that are designed to protect minors.
This is another problem that I have with this, is that there isn't a lot of scrutiny here
because minors especially in the UK are afforded a lot more privacy protection than had this
happened in the United States.
There isn't a lot of scrutiny of the process by which the sentence I think has been meted
out, but I do certainly hope that he and the family appeal, presuming that this is a he
and not a she, but whoever it is, I feel like this is a tough sentence.
It's really hard to swallow.
To me, the sentence just says that the rest of us don't know how to deal with somebody
like this, and the only answer we can think of is to lock them away and not deal with
them.
I think that's where the real failing is here.
What he did, yes, it's not following the rules, but it is not something that in any way mandates
a life sentence or even the threat of one.
This is the legal system in the UK, which I think is important to point out, but also
as you said, there's a lot more privacy afforded to juveniles in this situation.
In fact, Ariane Cortage is being charged alongside another individual who was 17 at the time,
and therefore there is no info about that person out there beyond the fact that they
are a minor.
In a case like this, it's very obviously, okay, there's some sort of mental health issue
at play here.
This is not just about he wants to keep committing cyber crimes.
This is a mental health issue, and we have to wonder because we're not being given the
information.
We have to wonder what sort of mental health is in store for him.
Something like he's going to be remanded to a hospital for life, that is terrifying.
If they were to just have some sort of sentence that says, we're going to check him out, we're
going to see what kind of mental health situation this is, we're going to act accordingly, that
I think would have a different vibe than just we're going to put this kid in a hospital
for life.
I think this is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
This is definitely worth continuing to try and see what's in store.
As you said, these were videos of gameplay, the same sort of videos that Rockstar is releasing
now to build up hype for the game.
In response to the sentence being handed down to this kid, another individual from Lapsus,
from the group, seems to have just recently leaked the entire source code of the previous
game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, as an act of protest and as a free Ariane move.
It sure seems like all this material is up for the grabs.
People are just downloading and distributing.
I'm not trying to blame the quote-unquote victim here, because I question how much of
a victim they actually are, but it sure seems like the security leaves a lot to be desired.
The fact that this is a game, and there are so many dangerous precipices around trying
to connect the fiction of a video game about crime to real world crime and harming people,
there is a certain, I guess, bitter irony to the fact that Rockstar is bringing these
charges and bringing the hammer down on this kid, so they could better sell their game
about doing heists and crimes.
Yeah, there's that too.
The whole premise of Grand Theft Auto is stealing cars and beating up people and all kinds of
horrible things, so I don't want to pass judgment based on that, but it is kind of ironic.
Yeah, I think we should be cautious to immediately sympathize, because what are we really agreeing
to?
I mean, to even say that this is explicitly a mental health concern with no questions
asked or just very little other more detail about it, it seems hilarious, because mental
health, maintaining that at all?
Think about the context, we are not living in some techno-utopia, and the idea that people
will follow the rules, that it's a foregone conclusion, that they just want to get along
with your systems, and because it's, oh darn, a legal line that is crossed.
A lot of people don't care, especially criminals, and we need to really, I think, sober up about
a society of people that are under stress with wielding these systems, profiting from
them a lot, and a lot of people with skills like this don't necessarily fit in and don't
want to.
They don't want to fit in with this society.
They don't want to fit in with the rules or the laws around how to use a type of chip
or how to communicate across certain types of networks.
They understand that it's really, there's so much emphasis on containing people and
containing all of this that it's not going to yield less hacking, the harsher the penalty,
I think, and that's my takeaway or where I would go with it.
A lot of people don't want to follow this stuff anymore and just allow the media, the
ad campaigns and stuff to infiltrate their lives.
There's a cost, and if they can't get their security together and someone that has felt
that doesn't want to really get along, doesn't feel they get along, but excels at this and
explicitly doesn't really want to agree to impulse control around their skill, how can
we really expect them to want to get along?
I'm very, the more I think about this in a counterintuitive way, the more I'm like, I
kind of question it.
Go ahead, Rob.
It is counterintuitive because due to the nature of what's going on and the way they
do things there, we don't have a lot of information about this at all.
We have very little information about what's actually going on, what factors are actually
at play when the psychiatrist over there made this determination about this kid.
A lot of what we're saying is just theorizing and that sort of thing, but yeah, we really
don't have enough information, I think, to come to a fair judgment, but I would really
like to believe that we don't live in a world where something like a life sentence in a
hospital is something that would be handed down without a damn good reason.
We can only hope.
Okay.
Well, we would definitely be following this story because it certainly is of interest
to us as well as many of our listeners.
Here's something else from Australia, which is fascinating to me, enlisting thousands
of smart speakers in Australian homes to detect intimate partner violence could be an unprecedented
opportunity to help victims.
That's according to a study from this article from ABC, their broadcast network down there,
but Monash University researchers found the potential solution was also loaded with ethical
considerations and could put the onus of responsibility on victims, produce too many false positives
and negatives, and remove pressure from the government to address the causes of domestic
violence.
Now this is pretty interesting because apparently they intend to use smart speaker technology
to listen for things like screaming or signs of abuse, but that opens up a whole lot of
other concerns.
In fact, one of our listeners, Neil, writes into us, actually sent us this article, and
he says, while the article is interesting enough and talks of ethics, et cetera, I find
it passing strange that it completely misses the elephant in the room in that it is just
assuming that it's acceptable that these smart speakers are just listening to everything
and can send it to the mothership to be processed to see what is happening.
Have we really become so blasé that no one cares at all about privacy in the home and
are happy to share it all with the cloud?
I would say many of us have.
I know you guys have one of these devices, and yes, we do over here, and we use it for
experiments and for fun and things like that, but I got to tell you, oftentimes it barges
into the middle of a conversation.
When we don't say the trigger word, it hears something, and sometimes it really injects
itself and it's unwelcome.
It's a wake word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a wake word.
The word for this one is computer, and fortunately, I said that low enough where I can see it
across the room.
It didn't trigger.
But if you're watching Star Trek or something, oh my God, every two minutes you have to tell
it to shut up.
Is there a command to tell it to ignore things for a period of time?
I would hope so.
But finishing this letter here, I personally don't want one of these devices.
I did experiment with the open-source privacy-focused one called Mycroft, specifically the Raspberry
Pi version known as Pycroft, but decided I didn't like it anyway.
Thanks, Neil, for that insight.
Any thoughts here?
Rob?
Yeah.
I have a lot of thoughts about this.
I mean, we have a smart speaker in our home, and the thing is, even if I believed that
it was okay that it was listening on everything and sending it to the cloud and possibly flagging
it for things like domestic violence, which I don't.
I think that's all terrifying.
We can't get this thing to play the right song when we tell it to play some music and
it plays something completely different because it wasn't very good at interpreting what we
were saying to it.
And if you throw in things like listening for domestic violence, I mean, we watch a
lot of television.
I play Grand Theft Auto games, and it hears the wrong thing and decides to flag us for
something that is actually not happening in reality.
And that's kind of a scary concept, I think.
The whole thing is terrifying, the whole idea that also, you should excuse me, that domestic
violence sounds like one thing, that intimate partner violence sounds like one thing and
only one thing, and that's the only thing it sounds like.
This is a very, very dangerous moment, because if we're assuming that that's not the case,
then it becomes listening for everything, transmitting everything.
And then how do you decide who gets listened to and who doesn't?
And not entirely dissimilarly, remember when we were talking about security cameras on
the subway and who's going to be reviewing all of this material?
When there's that much to look at, you're going to miss what's actually there because
of all the extraneous noise.
You know, Eastern Europe learned this lesson back in the 80s.
I think we still have yet to learn it.
And we're only a step or two away from people saying, you know what, just listen to everything
all the time.
We trust the authorities, and to be fair, do it to everybody.
We're not that far from this, and there are people out there now who probably already
want that.
Alex, did you have something?
I find this whole concept really appalling.
I don't think it would ever fly in the United States.
It would be too offensive to have, especially a listening device in your home, scouring
the airwaves in your house, of all places, for some kind of criminal activity.
It would be so offensive to the Fourth Amendment that I just don't see it as flying, unless
you somehow consent to this as part of the terms of service or terms of use, et cetera.
Or terms of probation or something like that.
That's one possibility, too.
The other issue here, and the article mentions this, is that there would be a bunch of false
positives.
What would happen if you're watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and there's a bunch of
women screaming in the background or something, and that gets flagged as an indication of
domestic violence?
The police are called.
Does that give the police, then, justification to come into your home?
Is a detection on a smart speaker, then, equatable to something like probable cause?
These are legal issues that I really hope we don't ever have to deal with, because the
answer should be no.
That's stupid.
We shouldn't do that in the first place.
Yeah.
Couldn't agree more.
Go ahead, Gayle.
Now, I'm just thinking about other ways that, you know, other avenues in which privacy might
even get more compromised, in which, you know, Rob's saying he plays Grand Theft Auto,
which is great.
I will admit it.
I am a huge fan of Law & Order SVU.
I watch SVU all the time.
So if our smart speaker heard something that it thought sounded like intimate partner violence,
but they said, wait a second, let's cross-check this.
Hey, YouTube TV, what was being watched in their home right now?
Oh, it was SVU.
This isn't a thing.
Are they also, you know, so is it going to go from the smart speaker to whatever streaming
services we have going to see where that sound might have been coming from?
Well, I do know, and I've seen this happen, popular programs that air, it doesn't catch,
even if the keyword is said, the trigger word is said, it skips over that because somehow
it's registered that it knows this is part of a TV program.
So it's not necessarily what streaming services do you subscribe to.
It's kind of like the YouTube copyright check where it sees if something exists someplace
else and is claimed by somebody else.
I think something similar is happening here.
Go ahead, Kyle.
I just wanted to suggest also including that it was the technology that would be able potentially
to distinguish between media that it already knows fingerprints or patterns of, but also
what the relationship dynamic becomes, like how the nature of abuse, I think Gila pointed
that out, and I think there's more there.
Just thinking generally about this idea of, okay, well, once this device is placed there,
then you're sort of indicating that this is watching for certain behaviors.
So well, what other behaviors that it can't detect will happen around that as a result
of this change, whether it's people purchasing it or it being introduced as a feature on
things they already have in various households.
But also, is it a good indicator, a good overt way of protecting the relationship?
Is there protection actually occurring as a result of this or is it moving the behaviors
around out of sight or earshot in this case?
Go ahead, Rob.
And Alex mentioned, will people accept something like this?
And I think there's no worries that they wouldn't because, I mean, how popular are the ring
doorbells right now?
Despite how much we complain about them on this program, despite all the news stories
that regularly happen where people's footage got used in the wrong way or something, people
still love those things, despite what they're signing away their rights to when they install
one.
And assuming that this kind of thing gets handed off to automated AI type, what's the
word I'm looking for?
People who were checking it, you know, when you were a kid, did you ever have a science
project where your teacher said, OK, go home and say lovely things to your dog, but in
a mean voice?
Oh, yeah.
And then say mean things to your dog, but say them in a lovely voice and your dog won't
be able to tell the difference between the two because the tone of voice is the issue.
So if we're listening for decibel levels, if we're listening for tone and there are
not like this is not going to work on so many levels, it is terrifying.
And the if the invasions of privacy that are just already we've been spinning on this what
three minutes, I can't even think about where this could actually go.
Well, it's something that we're definitely going to be following.
Kyle, last word on this.
I would encourage people as a remedy.
If you have the luxury of additional rooms, make a place where there isn't stuff listening
and recording and filming.
That's if you can find any space.
Yeah, that's just like how people got around the cameras in London by committing the crimes
just where they know the cameras.
No, I'm not saying for crime.
I'm saying for general privacy, not in this case.
Privacy will be a crime.
Mark my words.
Oh, actually, you might you might be on to something.
Listener Leratchew writes in apparently mirror newspapers have been hacking into Prince Harry's
voicemail system.
You hear about this?
They were found libel, I believe.
And listening to his messages, this is quite a while ago.
In fact, it was a big scandal years ago as well.
Except our listener writes, probably wouldn't have happened if he changed the pin.
Piss poor security strikes again.
Well, you know, that's not entirely true.
I'm not sure if it's true in this case.
But I do know that one of the ways that they were listening in and this this was revealed
years ago, there is a service on many cell phone systems where let's say you have your
own cell phone and you want to check your voicemail, do you want to enter your password
every damn time?
No, you're calling from your phone.
Obviously it's you.
So you just hit voicemail.
It logs you in.
Well, what they were doing was spoofing the caller ID to the voicemail system.
Voicemail system was saying, oh, it's Prince Harry calling.
Well, I don't need to ask for his password because it's obviously him.
And that's what they were doing.
It was really simple.
I wouldn't even call it hacking.
It's just basically evading something in really the poor security was with the phone companies.
If that is the method they used, then that is something that definitely should be condemned.
Why don't they ever pay the phone companies?
I mean, really?
I mean, pay for their they get scott free.
The consumer is the victim and they are lawyered up.
They have all the money and all the control over these systems.
They put in antiquated measures.
Yeah, it's like they didn't keep up with the security protocols.
All right.
I'm also told that this very same listener, LaRoccia, is the one who wrote a song or put
together a song.
Apparently, I was talking about the hacker group known as Gay Furry Hackers a couple
of weeks ago, and that caused a big stir for some reason.
And now there's a song that's circulating in the clubs.
So we're going to be let's take a listen.
And okay, you know what, I can handle this.
No problem.
Let's see what it sounds like from from one of our listeners.
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