The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
You know what, we all know how it goes.
We're going to cut off the theme a little bit early because we're running behind.
Because guess what, the radio station changed its IP apparently.
And they didn't tell us, so we were connected to nothing for a while.
But we're connected, we figured the whole thing out.
Here we are, Emanuel here, Kyle over there.
And out in Skype line, we have Rob2Firefly.
We have, I forgot you, Alex.
Yes, it's I.
And Gila.
Everybody's here, right?
Everybody say hi at once so we can save time.
Hi.
Hi.
Oh, my God.
Okay, and Kyle, is everything okay?
Everyone figuring it all out.
I'm okay, how are you?
I'm not asking how you are.
I care how you are.
I'm glad you asked.
I'm asking how our connection is.
Just live in the dream.
Apologies to everybody because that was, yeah, unfortunate.
But we got through it.
We got through it.
It reminds me of the early days when we were connecting remotely.
And there was a lot of yelling back and forth and people running around.
But we've grown since then.
Yeah, okay.
So here we are, another edition of Off the Hook.
We're on until 8 o'clock, so we're going to have to speed things up just a little bit.
So big news, big news this week.
I'm sure everybody has heard that Julian Assange, in I guess a move nobody really saw coming, at least not right now, he was freed from prison.
He is currently in Australia.
And what's amazing is that on this very show, we were talking about that months ago.
Enough is enough.
He's basically been in prison, been holed up in an embassy, been on the run for such a long time.
Whether you believe that he was completely innocent or whether he was the devil personified, everybody should be able to agree that he has suffered enough and this has to stop.
And Alex, I know that you've even written an upcoming column that pretty much outlined almost exactly what happened yesterday, two days ago.
Anything you care to add?
I do, yeah.
I mean, it's...
You've got to speak up a little bit, though.
You're very low for some reason.
Oh, sorry.
Is this any better?
Yeah, much better.
Okay, all right.
So, I'll just...
And by the way, I'm coming to you guys from London.
So, I'm here at the Chelsea Arts Club in London.
Well, don't look for Julian Assange there.
He's no longer in the UK.
No, he's no longer in London.
He's no longer...
I think the Ecuadorian embassy was in Knightsbridge, if I recall correctly.
Oh, no, it was in London.
No, it was in London.
Knightsbridge is in London.
Okay.
Well, I don't know why you're being particular about where in London it is.
But, yeah, he wasn't in a prison in London.
I'm sorry?
Very close to one of the, you know, really exclusive department stores.
Okay, well, I'm glad people know this now.
But let's talk about your insight into all this.
Well, my insight into all this, I have to say, I think I called it.
I think I really called it.
Months ago, I wrote that the United States, if they wanted to prosecute Julian Assange,
the best way forward would be to drop all of the charges, just maintain one of the charges.
But here's the difference between what I had called and what had actually happened.
I said that all of the charges should be dropped except for one of the, what we would consider to be the hacking charge.
Yeah, computer fraud abuse act nonsense where Julian Assange was charged with a conspiracy to access a federally protected computer
by essentially trying to crack a hash, right, a rainbow table,
by utilizing a rainbow table to try to crack a hash of a Department of Defense computer.
And what had happened here in this particular plea agreement was very, very similar.
But I think in a lot of ways, I think we still have a lot of danger in what has happened with respect to Assange
because he had pleaded to a conspiracy to access protected information, classified information,
and distribute that.
So that information, so when I had argued that the United States should drop all the charges except one,
I said, well, the point behind dropping all these charges was to protect journalistic integrity,
to protect the First Amendment, because a lot of the media organizations,
even go back to a couple of years ago, CNN and elsewhere it said, you know,
even Fox, Jake Taper and all these places, saying this was a really big problem.
If Julian Assange was charged with some kind of crime, then this would have been a big problem for all of us
because anybody that's reporting on national security-related issues could also be charged with this particular crime.
So, insofar as we see Julian Assange being freed and this is all being a great thing,
there's still a great danger here.
There's still a great danger here.
I don't think that we should discount that whatsoever.
So, I had suggested in my article that will be coming out in various publications,
things, that the United States government should have charged him with that single hacking charge,
as we would know.
There's a big difference now, because what Julian Assange had pleaded to was a charge to acquiring classified information,
or a conspiracy to acquire classified information, and then distribute it.
And so, the implications of the First Amendment are still there, and that's scary.
That's a very, very bad situation, I think.
Even though it isn't precedent-setting, because Julian Assange had actually,
he had pleaded to this type of thing.
It wasn't something that, there wasn't a trial, this wasn't a judicial decision,
this was a plea agreement.
That's what I wanted to ask you, the fact that he pleaded guilty to it instead of being found guilty of it,
does that make it a little more palatable as far as possible abuses of journalistic rights down the road?
The fact that he said, okay, yes, I'm guilty of this,
then we don't have to detail what it is about something that could apply to all kinds of other journalists
that would also make them subject to this.
Is that possible that him doing that prevented that from happening?
Well, it has a limited precedential effect because he pleaded to this particular case.
If he had gone to trial, and especially if this was something that was on appeal,
and there was some kind of judicial decision at that point,
then it would have had far greater precedential effect.
But I think that the whole idea that he pleaded to this particular charge that he was fighting against from the outset
is going to embolden the Department of Justice to try this on again later on.
You know, we're still dealing with a charge that has to deal with, at its roots,
the collection of information that deals with journalism.
This is exactly the type of thing that journalists do, especially in the national security context.
So, you know, if you're a journalist that reports on, I don't know, road closures or, you know, whatever,
and anything other than national security issues, this is not really going to be a problem.
But if you're a journalist that is an investigative journalist that might have some reasonable likelihood
of crossing over with classified information from the United States government,
this is still scary.
This is still bad.
And in the article that I had written that will come out in a publication that I think we all read
if we're listening to this particular show, what I had argued was that what should remain,
if the United States government wants to prosecute Assange and wants to go forward,
what should remain is the single hacking charge, the conspiracy to try to access a computer.
Because if you drop everything else, it stops that threat to the First Amendment.
Because I think what we still have here is a threat to journalistic integrity.
We still have some kind of threat to the techniques and the maneuvers that journalists engage in.
On a day-to-day basis, when you're engaged in any kind of national security reporting,
that's really scary for journalists.
So I see this as a win for Assange, but not necessarily as a win for the First Amendment
or a win for journalism itself.
I see a point.
And you believed he should have been charged under some sort of hacking offense instead,
where he was trying to crack some kind of code or something like that.
But the problem I had with that was that there wasn't really clear evidence that he actually did that
or did anything other than being on the phone.
But, you know, at this point, does that really matter?
Would that have been a better approach?
Or was this simply the easiest way out?
No, I think it would have been a much better approach, much better approach.
I think the evidence was there.
I think there was a lot of evidence that indicated that Assange and Chelsea Manning
had engaged in some kind of conspiratorial activity to try to crack a password for a DOD-related computer.
He mentioned, I think, quite specifically the use of rainbow tables.
And, you know, for our rainbow – I'm sorry, for our listeners that don't know what a rainbow table is,
it's like a reverse hash, right?
So when you create a hash of a password, it's a one-way cryptographic function.
It creates this long string of numbers and letters.
Rainbow hash is – I'm sorry, rainbow table is just this long list of pre-created hashes
that you're going to try to match against in order to crack a password.
So it's a way to reverse a password from a hash.
And doing that, if you're a quote-unquote journalist, arguably crosses the line.
So I think that there was an out for the federal government.
There was an out for the federal government to say, this is what Julian Assange did, and it was wrong.
He crossed the line between being a journalist and a conspirator to some kind of endeavor to access federally protected computers.
That's pretty clear.
But when you make the charge to which he pleaded about the access and the distribution of classified information,
you're still implicating journalism itself.
That's what's scary to me.
And so I don't see – I don't think that we should consider this as this massive win for the hacker culture,
for journalism, for free speech.
No.
It's not.
I don't think it is.
No, at this point, at least to me, the primary issue was getting him out of there.
He's done enough.
He's done enough whether you think it's good or bad.
There's certainly a lot of people who never forgave him for his role in getting Trump into office.
But no matter how you felt about him, he's a human being and has suffered enough and deserves to live his life in peace now and hopefully some quiet and hopefully just be with his family and friends and enough of this.
There are plenty of battles to fight and there are plenty of people to fight them, so I imagine this will be extended into all kinds of new characters.
But I'm curious, you know, the way this played out, maybe you have some insight into this as well.
Why did they have to go to the northern Mariana Islands, a territory of the United States, which very few of us know anything about?
Well, what was that all about?
When he said he'd never set foot on U.S. soil, he was fighting that.
So what happened?
Yeah, and to go back to the premises that you just mentioned, I think you're right, I totally agree as well that Assange had suffered enough.
And that was one of the things that I had written about was that we should think about this from the standpoint of proportionality.
This is a guy who published information and had suffered for so many years and held in such harsh conditions that his release should universally be seen as something good.
But I think that we should not lose sight of the fact that the United States government, the DOJ, had an opportunity to have Assange plead to a different type of charge that would not have implicated journalism.
Itself, and the manners by which journalists collect information, especially with respect to national security-related reporting and information and investigative journalism, and that's still imperiled by this.
It very much is.
But to go back to your question, why did he go to this crazy place, right?
I mean, the north Mariana in Saipan, right?
So he's on his way back to Australia.
That was why.
So apparently there is some kind of federal district court jurisdiction by which a federal court judge could bind the United States and Julian Assange while he's on his way to Australia if he makes a stopover.
So it's interesting.
It shows you the reach of the United States when it comes to jurisdiction and where we have certain types of infrastructure and operations.
But the other thing about this is, and I stress this very much, is that Assange and his supporters had announced all of this while he was leaving the United Kingdom before any kind of deal was struck, before any kind of judge had signed off on any kind of deal with the United States government and the Department of Justice.
That was a really, really risky endeavor because these kinds of plea agreements, especially when it comes to celebrity defendants and very high-profile defendants like this that are going to foreign countries and being essentially categorized as having served all of their time.
That's a really tricky and very, very delicate type of agreement that is struck between a defendant and the United States government.
So I think a lot of these supporters of Assange who started banging on Twitter or X, whatever the hell you want to call it these days, about how badly he was treated and how long he was there, all of this could have changed the outcome.
This was a really, I think, delicate and tricky type of situation to be sequenced, especially when you're talking about judges in Saipan that may not have a huge track record when it comes to decisions that are of this priority with the United States.
Yeah, Alex, what you're pointing out is I think it's a very interesting aspect, and it probably was an area of planning this and staging it logistically to have those assurances and guarantees because part of limiting free movement
and the kinds of detainment and the kinds of detainment and the kinds of detainment that Julian had been under were exactly the kind of concerns you might expect in him moving at all after so much of that,
that the kinds of extrajudicial activities and that very reach you're talking about were the types of things that he would report on and himself talk about
as far as far as the risks of revealing high-level secrets.
So I think that was a guarantee, or that's a very interesting observation in terms of the guarantee, and it's for such an unusual ruling to have had that,
and it speaks to, I think, sort of the level at which this was worked out.
Someone somewhere that was trustworthy made it very clear that this was going to be a path back home for him.
You know, I hope you're right about that.
I really do, because these types of agreements between the government and the defendant,
they're very often, you know, a judge will sign off on them very often,
but they're very delicate, and a judge can interject in whatever way he wants, he or she wants,
if he doesn't think an agreement is correct or appropriate or comports, let's say, with, you know,
traditional values of that particular country.
So this was really, really delicate, and I think that the pro-Assange camp really got ahead of themselves
when they saw him leaving the United Kingdom and making all these kinds of statements on Twitter,
it could have affected the outcome, depending upon what that particular judge in Saipan had for breakfast.
Yeah, but, you know, Julian Assange's reporters aren't very good at keeping secrets.
So I think that's what this is all boiled around, you know, is that's the issue here.
Yeah, and I think the government of Australia itself, as a nation, played a big part in guaranteeing some of that.
So he wouldn't appear on the mainland, he refused, absolutely, even with the plea deal,
he refused to appear in court on the mainland, and apparently they were not able to force him to do that,
and that's why he wound up in the, is that the furthest territory of the United States?
As close to Australia as he could possibly get.
Okay.
I think it might be, it's very, very close to Guam, right?
I mean, it's kind of off the coast of Guam and whatnot.
It's on the way.
Yeah, I don't understand any of that.
There are all these little islands out there that apparently they have, you know, U.S. license plates.
You know, come to think of it, I guess I've never seen a license plate from Guam.
Where would I?
How would I?
I'd have to be there to see it, or they'd have to fly their car all the way over here.
It's part of our commonwealth.
Or you could just buy one on eBay.
Well, okay, whatever.
So, that explains why he went there.
But did you know his flight cost $520,000?
Wow.
What airline was that?
Apparently, it was paid for by the Australian government, and they are raising funds to pay the Australian government back.
But, wow.
Okay, so I guess that was a private jet or something.
Yeah, it was some kind of chartered flight, and it also seemed like there were reporters and whatnot that were on the flight taking pictures of him while he was leaving.
Well, they should chip in, for sure.
They should, they really should, because their publication is going to make a considerable amount of all of those, a considerable amount of royalties on the basis of all of the pictures of Julian wistfully looking out the window while his flight took off.
I have to say, he looks pretty good.
I was afraid of what he had been through, being in prison for so long, and possibly abused.
I had no idea.
But he looked healthy.
No, he didn't look in bad shape at all.
No, and hopefully he is.
Hopefully, mentally, he's gotten through this.
And I look forward to a bunch of books.
I really do.
And hopefully he gets to tell his story.
Well, I think he did look great.
I do.
Obviously, we're talking about Julian Assange here, right?
We haven't heard the last of him.
He's getting out.
His plea deal is being inked.
We're going to hear from him, I think, momentarily.
But I really do think, and I think it's not – I think we have to stress this over and over and over again, but that Assange was charged with a crime that really implicates journalism in the United States.
And that can affect WBAI, that can affect Reuters, that can affect the AP.
And I think that there are very much too few media organizations reporting on that aspect of it.
There were so many organizations that reported on the charging of Julian Assange and how that could implicate journalism because it implicated the manners and the methodologies by which journalists,
especially national security journalists, talk with and interact with sources.
But this plea agreement is really not good for any of that.
And I think it's going to have a long-term knockoff effect on how journalism is conducted in the United States.
This is not a great – this shouldn't be seen, in my opinion, as a great win.
I think it's great that we have Julian Assange out of Belmar's prison in the United Kingdom.
But this is not a win for the First Amendment.
This is not a win for journalism.
This is not a win for free speech.
He pleaded to this charge.
And I'm not saying he should not have pleaded to this charge because of his conditions and whatnot.
But this may be the type of plea that would embolden an administration like the Trump administration that has pronounced its enemies as the mainstream media to go after anybody that would report on national security-related incidents.
Careful what you say there.
They're coming for you.
I'm curious, Alex, is the degree to which precedent is set different if it is met out in a trial and he would be found also guilty had it gone to trial?
Does that have a different weight because there's been sort of the Tetris of moving through the logic and the kinds of different statutes on down through the charges sort of thing?
Versus just pleading?
Yeah, it absolutely does.
When you take a plea agreement, there are very limited avenues for appeal.
And so your plea agreement is generally limited to your particular case.
So the precedential value of this from a common law standpoint, in the sense of other judges relying on this plea agreement as evidence or as an indication that this is what the law is, is limited.
However, there's a different type of precedential value that we often don't think about.
And that's the precedential value that this type of plea agreement has to embolden the Department of Justice to go after others that have, in their eyes, committed similar types of offenses.
And what would those defenses be?
Those defenses would be disclosing or publishing or reporting on classified information that relates to the United States government.
That's what we're talking about here.
Is it a foregone conclusion that they're really still interested in pursuing that and carving out that aspect of this particular law and its use with journalists?
Like, they're going to immediately try to fill that kind of logic or that ideology, their legal strategy sooner rather than later?
Or is it just sort of on the shelf then?
And you think it's just making it an opportunity for parties motivated to work with that and pursue it to a deeper level?
Well, that's an interesting issue, I think.
And I don't know the answer to that, but I think that the reasonable answer would be that what has happened with Assange has indicated to the Department of Justice that these types of plea agreements are certainly possible.
And that they can occur again in the future.
I would imagine that an administration like the Trump administration, should it come into power in the future, would try to capitalize on this type of precedent.
I think any administration would, actually, in all fairness.
I think any administration wants this kind of power and control.
Well, the question, I guess, at this point is, how do you fight a plea deal that everybody has agreed to?
How does, say, the ACLU or somebody take the Justice Department to court and say, this is not right, we don't want this to happen to people?
You can't.
You can't.
This is a private agreement between the Department of Justice and the defendant itself.
Well, I know for this case it's impossible, but I'm saying for the future, to keep this from becoming a precedent, is there any kind of step that can be taken?
No, I mean, everything's on a case-by-case basis here, right?
So everything is very, very, very much case-specific.
So I don't think there really is, but I think there is a very real fear that either kind of – and I think you're right about this, Emmanuel.
If you look back to the Obama administration, it's not like they were really friendly, anybody that was leaking classified information or reporting on classified information.
Yeah, and you know what?
The Bernie Sanders administration wouldn't be friendly either.
Any administration.
It's the office.
It's where people are in government.
It'll never happen.
You'll never have an administration that is seeing the First Amendment as the best thing ever.
They will always be trying to get more control and get more precedence.
Does that beget more or less leaks, though, right?
Well, I don't know.
I think, you know, leaks are something that are going to continue.
Hey, we saw one today, sort of.
We saw that Supreme Court filing that wasn't meant to be filed.
It wasn't really a leak, but they put it on the webpage by accident, and everybody grabbed it and reported on it.
I mean, another regime or possibly a future regime of our own, that could be illegal.
That could be something that people get prosecuted for.
Who knows?
So the mentality of telling the truth, of getting the news out there, that's what's important.
I found it interesting watching the media coverage of this.
Nobody mentioned the rainbow tables or anything like that.
They kept showing the video.
They kept showing the video of U.S. military killing journalists that was leaked way back, that started all this.
And it made it seem like that was the crime.
And I guess to many people, that was the crime, to tell that secret and to not protect the killers.
But actually, that, to me, was the most heroic act that was possible back then, is to reveal that information.
And I should point out the people who were behind that, were behind the killings, never got punished.
I don't think they even got named.
I might be wrong about that.
But it's just weird how the media goes to that and says, this is what he was in prison for.
And that's what it was all about, when there was a lot more than that as well.
But it's something we'll be talking about for ages.
But, you know, in Australia, there's, you know how we're very divided here, as far as, you know, one side versus another side.
It's something that's going on around the world.
We see it everywhere, you know, factions and sides and propaganda and political leanings and things like that.
Let me read you what David Shoebridge, a Greens senator from Sydney, from the Green Party.
Basically, he said that Mr. Hassan should never have been in jail for the crime of telling the truth.
Now, let's counter that with the conservative rural lawmaker, Barnaby Joyce, who says, you ready for this?
Okay.
I was very happy to hear that an Australian citizen who never committed a crime in Australia, was not a citizen of the United States, was never charged in the United Kingdom, is coming home.
They said the same thing.
They agree with each other on this.
Yeah.
Maybe there's a lesson there.
I don't know.
I don't know if we can do that here.
Yeah, Alex, go ahead.
There is.
And I think this even has implications to the Virgil Griffith case, too.
There are this notion of the extraterritoriality of the United States' laws, the application of U.S. laws outside of its borders, and what the reach of those laws are, is really a controversial subject.
Can we prosecute foreign nationals for the violation of U.S. laws if they're not U.S. citizens?
And they had no idea what those laws were.
And that's what's happening, I think, in Virgil's case with Christopher Ems, who was also an indicted co-conspirator in Virgil's case when it comes to the transfer of knowledge over to North Korea.
Many of our listeners are quite familiar with Virgil's case and what's going on there.
But it's this extraterritorial application of U.S. laws that I think really rubs a lot of foreign lawmakers and foreign legislators and foreign countries in general in the wrong way because it seems very much like we are acting as the global policeman here, and our laws are the only ones that should matter.
Well, I think that's a perfect example just in how the details and a lot of the different subject matter in Julian Assange's story kind of get hijacked by some of what the media ran with early on.
So that's a great point.
I know you have the other stories to go on.
Well, I just wanted to mention a couple of things about the history that we're about to be hit with this week with the debate coming up on Thursday.
Any thoughts on this?
Because, you know, it's the earliest presidential debate ever, June, instead of October.
And it's really turning into a big deal as far as what we're going to learn, find out, see how people compose themselves, see what they, you know, how they put sentences together, if they're paying any attention to what's going on, if they're qualified.
Not that it's going to change the minds of people who are steadfast in their opinions, but what I noticed, and maybe people don't realize this, it's a CNN debate, right, on Thursday.
It's on every channel.
It's not just on CNN.
It's on every damn news channel.
It's on Fox.
It's on MSNBC.
It's even on Newsmax.
It's on every broadcast station in New York City, every network station it is.
It's on PBS.
It's on C-SPAN, of course.
I've never seen a debate on so many channels at once.
This is really history that's hitting us here, and I'm not really sure what to expect.
Any thoughts?
Rob Gillow, you haven't said anything tonight, so maybe from you.
I thought we were still talking about Assange.
I kind of checked out mentally.
The debate situation is interesting in all the ways that it's different from previous debates.
I look forward to the edited highlights and the creative remixes and so on.
But I don't know.
I do remain dubious as to whether it will actually change any minds.
I think all the minds that there are to be made up about the coming election have already done,
because, as you mentioned, we are a strictly divided nation at this point.
The line between the quote-unquote sides is very sort of indelible,
and I don't know that anyone is ready to be enlightened in either direction.
And I think the fact that people have indicated their lack of willingness to work with the commission this year.
I mean, I do feel like going into 2020, we kind of all got debated out.
So the fact that there may not be as many this year, I think, can only be a good thing.
I think also the fact that the Republican nominating contest was something of a joke this year.
We shouldn't have the presumptive nominees yet.
We shouldn't, like, no.
So I'm fascinated by what's going to be happening.
And at the same time, though, I am – it's weird, yes, Emmanuel, it's very weird that this thing that's being broadcast
or put together by CNN is being broadcast so widely.
But at the same time, I'm glad.
Because of the balkanization of the media landscape and, you know, where the town halls and where the debates have been happening
and what people have been able to see and subscribe to,
I think the more people who get to watch it happen live, probably the better.
Not that I want to, but, again, the more available it becomes, the better, honestly.
Well, I agree with that.
It's just – it's bizarre.
And as a broadcaster, I'm fascinated by something of this nature.
For instance, you know, if you're watching Fox, is the CNN logo going to be there the whole time?
You know, is CNN just going to be basically everywhere that night?
Are they paying for this?
Or is CNN just trying to get it out to as many people as possible?
Well, usually, you know, if there's a debate and it's on Fox, it's only on Fox.
And you can use excerpts of it later.
But this, it's live.
It's on Channel 2.
It's on Channel 4.
It's on Channel 5.
It's on, you know, all the network channels, even Channel 13.
I've never seen anything like this.
It's probably a different agreement.
If they're hosting it, they'll host it like they're hosting any other event in that venue
that is their broadcasting headquarters.
And they'll have their own graphics, but probably have available signals from that place in Atlanta
to everywhere in the world that wants it, that are free of their particular graphics.
And then it'll be able to be widely distributed.
I'm curious about the graphics.
Will, you know, Fox say liar under Joe Biden when they disagree with something he says
or try and influence their viewers one way or another, it just seems kind of hard to believe
they're just going to have CNN take over their channel for 90 minutes, you know, just for the debate.
But it's going to be fascinating to see a little bit of history here, no matter how you feel
about the whole political scene in general.
Alex, do you have anything on this?
Because we're going to move to one more story tonight.
I think it is very historical.
It's going to be extraordinarily interesting to watch this and, God, you know, there's just so much riding on it.
Yeah, you might have some trouble in England, though.
I'm not sure if it's being broadcast there.
I'm sure it is somewhere.
I'm sure it is.
Yeah, I mean, England's got its own issues at the moment.
So even if they don't broadcast it, I think America, we can deal with our own issues.
Well, I like how in the UK the election is on July 4th and that's it.
You know, it was called a couple of weeks ago and it's going to be over July 4th.
We've been at this now for years and it never seems to end.
Well, but it's a weird thing, too, to think that a general election or the formation of a government for one of, I think, the world's powers can just be called at will.
You know, it's not a set date at any time.
You know, these general elections are, you know, they're called within a certain time frame, but they're called whenever party in power wants them.
Yeah, within five years it has to happen, I believe, is how it works there.
Not a bad system, but interesting.
Okay, one more thing that we wanted to mention tonight has to do with a special place in Seattle that we just found out is not going to be around much longer.
Kyle, since you're from Seattle, maybe you can tell us something about this.
This is a sad story.
It really is.
It really is.
I'm tired of sad stories about things going away.
It's true.
And, yeah, the article's from GeekWire.
It is, the title is, Seattle's Living Computers Museum Logs Off for Good as Paul Allen Estate Will Auction Vintage Items.
I'll forgive them for the logs off for good in the headline because you really can't avoid that.
I get it.
Well, that is probably what caught everyone's eye when they got this news today.
Well, you know, I just remember going to this place, and it was just such an amazing, spacious area where you could walk through.
And I remember going to a PDP-10 and actually seeing the same prompts that I saw in high school.
And I was able to play with the emulator, and just, it was incredible, the hands-on.
Why?
Why, Kyle?
Why does this have to go away?
Why does it have to?
First of all, it's been closed since COVID.
I didn't know that.
But why can't it continue?
That is a question that a lot of people are asking in the side conversations around this tragic news.
A lot of hackers, a lot of dedicated people worked at this place and kept them going in retirement.
These were living, working machines that never stopped.
They found homes and were restored, refurbished, and running.
And it was able to be a, as they describe it, hands-on showcase for rare computing technology and interactive displays.
And they were really interactive.
One of my favorite ones, I think a lot of people used as a conversation piece,
was the recreations of different rooms, like the arcade room,
and different things that people would describe from their childhood of a certain age
as their introduction to computer and game systems.
But, Emmanuel, you might be interested to know that that was not just any PDP-10.
That was the first computer that both Allen and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates first used when founding Microsoft.
And that is part of what is being auctioned.
So, yes.
Auctioned?
Are they going to auction this off?
I mean, people won't be able to access it if some rich dude somewhere buys it and sticks it in his house?
That is part of the question in this.
It was confirmed that the 12-year-old museum is closed for good.
The museum website and social media accounts were taken down Tuesday.
What, this Tuesday?
Yesterday?
Yeah, this is a recent story.
Yeah, absolutely.
It was opened in 2012 in Seattle's Soto neighborhood,
five years after Allen's company purchased a Toad 1 system from XKL Systems.
The museum expanded in 2016 with a first-floor exhibit as well as a hands-on computer science learning lab,
and it grew to become the largest collection of fully restored and usable supercomputers, mainframes, and mini-computers for that time.
But, unfortunately, in 2020, like a lot of places, they had trouble because they were a cultural institution running as a museum.
They did have the backing of Allen's endeavors and wealth.
However, there was less of the public available during the pandemic.
Well, they were closed.
How can the public support them if they're closed?
Obviously, that's going to happen, but they have so much support, so much money behind them.
That is one of the things that is being discussed, that it is very poor planning in the sort of legacy of this place.
It could have been operated in a way that sustained it, but, alas, here we are.
It is not going forward.
Do you put soft dollars behind this?
Yes.
Before Paul Allen's death in 2018, it had the backing of a lot of his, not philanthropic, but just general investments and whimsical interests of exceedingly wealthy tech titans.
It's not like them to make bad decisions.
It was not conceived with the long-term sustainment in mind, and I think that's something that people will talk a little bit more about.
There is some good news, and we only have a minute, so tell us the good news.
Well, this stuff will be available, and hopefully people, they'll find good homes once again.
There are lots of good museums and so forth, but there were some really cool exhibits, in addition to the 1980s and the classroom, the gaming arcades that I talked about, where people could go and interact in those eras and do a little time travel.
There was a remote vintage system that has been transferred to SDF.org.
They had a lot of volunteers that helped out there.
And who are SDF?
The Super Dimension Fortress is a free software community.
They exist providing remote access machines, and you can actually get a shell account there.
You can find out more about them, but they will continue those machines that were available.
They were basically simulations of machines, of computers and operating systems that people could actually play with and access, running old programs and that kind of stuff.
That will exist under their care.
And the museum was called, again?
The Living Computers Museum.
Of Seattle.
Wow.
Sad news.
But hopefully something comes out of that, and people learn to preserve what really matters.
Hey, we're out of time.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
We're going to continue the conversation over on YouTube.
Go to youtube.com slash channel 2600.
You'll find us there.
And back here next week.
Good night.