We're sorry, but the service you are trying to use is not available on this line.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
One diddley bump, but I best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
One diddley bump!
One diddley bump!
Thank you.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Yeah, symbolically.
Yeah, you're a symbol.
Over in Signalville.
I'm sorry, I keep saying that wrong.
Signal Land is Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And we have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
You do.
Good evening.
Signalville's on the West Coast.
I have to remember that.
Well, it's been another action-packed week in occupied land here because that's how it feels week after week.
Just one horrible thing after another happens, and it feels like we're kind of powerless to do anything about it.
But, you know, we're not.
We're not really powerless.
We have power.
We have this amazing place.
We have WBAI.
And I got to say, you know, the best thing you can do today to feel empowered and to do something good for your fellow citizen is to support WBAI.
And perhaps somebody out there can give some specifics as to how to do that exactly, the exact website URL and maybe even a phone number and things like that.
Does anybody have that?
We certainly can do that.
You can, if you want to pledge to the station, you can go to buddy, that's B-U-D-D-Y dot W-B-A-I dot org.
Or if you're telephonically inclined, you can call toll-free 833-922-4692.
And give what you can to help us, to help keep us doing what we're doing at BAI.
Let them know you're donating as a listener of Off the Hook.
We always appreciate that.
It helps us.
It helps the station.
And it helps you keep getting what we're putting out there.
So, yes, buddy.wbai.org.
You can make a one-time donation or you can become a BAI buddy, which gives us a recurring donation from you of any amount you like.
And it gives us what's really unusual and really helpful in the world of nonprofits, which is a dependable income.
It's so much easier to run a place like this when you know that you're getting some money on X and Y dates.
And you can plan accordingly.
Exactly.
Please remember that WBAI and the Pacifica Foundation are a 501c3 organization.
Your giving to the station, giving to the Pacifica Foundation is tax deductible.
And if you have an individual retirement account and you need to make a qualifying charitable distribution this year, this is a great option for that.
You can find the Pacifica Foundation EIN on the website at WBAI.org.
You may have a corporate matching giving that you can do.
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There are lots of ways to give to BAI.
And if you give $25 or more over the course of the year, you become a voting member of WBAI.
That is also a great benefit.
But you can vote in elections.
And if you are a BAI buddy and you give us $5 a month, five months in, you do, in fact, become a member of the station.
There is no downside here.
Again, visit buddy.wbai.org to become a monthly sustaining donor.
And, again, the more regular donations we have to count on, the less we have to come to you for, and the better we all do.
So, please, do feel free.
If you have other questions about ways to donate, you can visit WBAI.org slash donate and learn all kinds of fun ways to do that.
Yeah, check it out.
And, again, buddy.wbai.org is the best thing for everyone.
So, please, do check that out.
Now, you don't have to pay very close attention to the news to come to the conclusion that we're being led by a group of petty tyrants that can't take criticism, that certainly aren't capable of doing the job.
And it's just one carnival after another watching them in action.
They have declared war on us.
Because by us, I mean free-thinking people.
I mean non-commercial radio.
I mean, you know, anybody who has the chutzpah to say anything against what is currently happening right now.
You do that, and all of a sudden you're in the crosshairs like Harvard, you know, where you stand up for yourself and you are a threat.
But here at WBAI, you know, we make NPR pale by comparison because we speak our minds and we don't apologize for that.
And the things that we say are things that the powers that be certainly do not want us to say.
They don't want us to talk about - they don't want us to be around at all.
You know, if they could, they would deport all of us.
And they're working towards that.
They really are.
You don't have to use any imagination to get to that conclusion.
That's why it's so important to not have to worry about how we're going to pay the rent or something - you know, I don't want to say trivial because rent is anything but trivial for many of our listeners and certainly for us.
But it's something that shouldn't be front and foremost in our minds.
We should be doing the hard-hitting, investigating, and exposing of corruption and hypocrisy and all the other things that are in abundance right now.
And, you know, we've seen countless instances of mainstream media buckling under, being cowards, retracting statements, even paying money to the president's causes because they're afraid.
The same thing with corporate America, you know, non-media.
The same thing with the big tech companies.
They are all terrified.
Why? Because they have so much to lose.
They've made billions more, probably, and it could all go away if the petty tyrant in charge decides they are the enemy.
He can make life very, very difficult for them.
So they do not want that.
And that's why you're seeing less corporate backing of pride marches, less corporate support for anything that criticizes Donald Trump and his kind.
That's why you're seeing so much in the way of hypocrisy, people that you thought were doing the right thing, all of a sudden doing something else completely differently.
You're seeing it in academia.
You're seeing some universities that just are agreeing to do whatever they're told instead of doing what is right and what any academic institution would support.
Freedom of speech, freedom of speech, questioning, rebellion, all of that.
It's healthy and it's necessary, especially in these times.
So that's why.
That's why it's important to have a strong voice, especially in a place like New York City.
You know, we have many non-commercial radio stations, and I'm happy for every single one of them.
But there's something very special about WBAI.
For one thing, we're the most middle of the dial that you can get.
We're at 99.5.
There's a whole story behind that we don't have time for.
But most non-commercial stations are shunted over to the left of the dial, below 92.
There are a couple of exceptions, but we're in the middle.
You know, it doesn't really mean anything except that a lot of people find us by accident because they're not in the non-commercial zone.
They're in the commercial zone.
They're looking for a commercial station.
And all of a sudden, wow, you're listening to a radio show about hackers.
How did that happen?
Well, it's been happening since 1960.
Not the show about hackers, but non-commercial radio at 99.5 FM in New York City.
And it's no coincidence that WBAI is one of the longest living stations in New York City.
If you go to any frequency on the dial, there is a story behind that particular frequency
and how it once played a different type of music or had a different format and then was bought and traded and just changed to something completely different,
leaving many of its listeners disappointed and upset that something they were depending on had disappeared.
Now, we have not been without struggle and without challenges to our own frequency, to our own broadcasting license.
And in fact, to this day, we still are.
But we always come back.
You might find several stories of how this place has been shut down, but we are always back.
And we are always doing the same thing, which is asking you for support and broadcasting rebellious, independent, creative radio.
And there's very, very few stations like that left, but I'm proud to be part of this one.
So anyway, buddy.wbai.org, please support this place.
Support it in droves, because if it does go away, if it is shut down by people who are afraid of freedom of speech,
it's not going to come back, it's not going to come back if they win.
And we can't let that happen.
All right, let's get into the show, because we have a lot of things to talk about tonight.
First of all, let's stay with the White House for a moment, because this is just, this is what's known as a delicious story.
The White House is investigating after one or more people reportedly accessed the contacts from the personal phone of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles
and used the information to contact other top officials and impersonate her.
Oh, I would have loved to have heard that.
Wiles reportedly told people that her phone was hacked.
I could just hear her saying it, too.
So the Wall Street Journal first reported the hack of Wiles' phone, and CBS News has also confirmed that report.
I don't know why CBS News had to confirm what the Wall Street Journal said.
Okay, well, fine.
Everybody agrees.
The hacker or hackers are said to have accessed her phone contacts, including the phone numbers of other top U.S. officials and influential individuals.
The Wall Street Journal reports some contacts received phone calls impersonating Wiles, which used, get ready, artificial intelligence to impersonate her voice
and also sent text messages from a number not associated with her.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly would not say, when asked by TechCrunch, not TechCrunch is involved in the story,
if authorities had determined if a cloud account associated with her personal device was compromised
or if her phone was targeted by a more advanced cyber attack, such as one that involves the use of government-grade spyware.
Yeah, in response, the White House said it takes the cybersecurity of all staff very seriously, and this matter continues to be investigated.
Yeah, okay.
Good luck with that.
This is the second time Wiles has been targeted by hackers.
She hasn't been around that long, right?
2024?
Okay, last year, the Washington Post reported that Iranian hackers had attempted to compromise her personal email account.
Wall Street Journal said Friday, citing sources, the hackers were in fact successful in breaking into her email
and obtained a dossier on Vice President J.D. Vance, then Trump's running mate.
This is the latest cybersecurity incident to beset the Trump administration in the months since taking office.
And, you know, it really hasn't been that long, you know, there's, there's, well, you can fit them on one hand still, right?
January, February, March, April, okay, two hands.
But it's not much, not many months.
And they've had quite a few incidents.
In March, former White House top national security advisor, Michael Walsh, mistakenly added a journalist
to a signal group of top White House officials, including Vance and Wiles,
which included discussions of a planned military airstrike in Yemen.
That's not really a breach.
That's just a dumbass, right?
It's somebody, somebody doing something they're not supposed to do.
But plenty of time for breaches.
Reports later revealed that the government officials were using a signal clone app called TeleMessage,
which was designed to keep a copy of messages for government archiving.
TeleMessage was then subsequently hacked on at least two occasions, revealing the contents of its users' private messages.
Check and mate.
So that's what happens when you have people in charge that don't know what they're doing.
Yeah, it happens, you know, it happens almost everywhere.
But when it happens here, I don't know, it just seems to be extra special somehow.
They put extra ingredients into their cyber attacks, into their security breaches.
Thoughts?
Yeah.
Sure.
I could jump in here on a number of things with that particular story.
But I find it really troubling when you have all these federal officials that have seemingly just incessant problems with cybersecurity and cyber hygiene generally.
And the first response that they always have is, my phone was hacked.
I was hacked.
This was hacked.
The device was hacked.
Without providing any further details about the device, the methodology of the hack, without giving any indication as to what the hell had happened to the particular phone,
and whether they were exercising due care over that data and that device and the classified and other unclassified but controlled information they may have that belongs to the federal government.
So I'm getting really tired of this.
My device was hacked nonsense.
I feel like we should be demanding a lot more information about this.
I mean, we're a much more mature populace right now that understands these things.
We've got lots of technical experts and no shortage of people willing to opine in the media like this show about how these things could happen.
So I think it's high time we demand some more details about this.
And we should not allow, and the media should not allow, these federal officials to just seemingly claim that their phones were hacked anymore.
Well, you know, we're doing a lot of demanding lately.
I mean, Chuck Schumer is always demanding things, always writing letters.
How do we ensure that we get answers?
Because I don't think they're going to tell us anything.
We just have to kind of theorize as to what happened, what kind of mistake was made.
I mean, yeah, she said her phone was hacked.
Okay, how?
Susie, how did that happen exactly?
You know, did you use a stupid password?
Did somebody shoulder surf?
Did you use an app that you didn't know where it came from?
You know, there's so many ways that you can be compromised.
It's important.
You know, you're the White House chief of staff.
That's kind of an important job.
So we need to make sure that you're employing the basic security measures, you know, the basic ones.
Well, and to add to that, Emmanuel, I think that the public would have a right to know whether or not this is some kind of zero-day type of attack or a zero-click kind of attack.
That would be some kind of indication that a nation was behind a particular attack on the chief of staff as opposed to some kind of ordinary fraudster or cyber criminal.
And in this particular instance, I might be wrong, but I think that the FBI did rule out that nations were behind this, meaning that nations were not behind this particular attack.
As I understand it and what I've read, but I could be wrong about that.
How do you rule that out?
How exactly do you do that?
Well, I guess you would have to perform some kind of forensics on this and look at the sophistication involved in the attack.
And if you're ruling out nation states being behind this, then it probably wasn't a hell of a sophisticated attack that resulted in, however, the breach occurred on this particular device.
I'm not trying to be difficult here, but what if a nation state simply realizes that they don't need to use something sophisticated to compromise a particular person, and they just hire some ordinary person to do this, and then it doesn't seem like a nation state, but it is.
And that happens all the time.
That happens all the time.
There are initial access brokers that sophisticated APTs or advanced persistent threats or nation states will use in order to make those types of initial breaches, whether it's a device, a company, an account, et cetera.
And it gives them some kind of plausible deniability or at least breaks that chain of attribution, makes it much more difficult for somebody to figure out whether or not there is a sophisticated actor on the other side.
And in this case, it doesn't sound like there was a great deal of sophistication needed to breach the chief of staff here.
Well, can only imagine the kind of harm that could be done or that might have been done, and you just have to wonder what kinds of security measures are or are not being taken in this group of people.
All right, here's another story about somebody who tried to do something.
Maybe it was well-intentioned, but boy, it was stupid.
This is a 28-year-old who was a cybersecurity employee at the Defense Intelligence Agency.
His name is Nathan Latch.
He had a top-secret clearance, worked in the Insider Threat Division.
I'm sorry, that's just a really cool name of a place to work, Insider Threat Division.
He spent his days enabling user monitoring on individuals with access to a defense intelligence agency known as DIA systems, including employees under surreptitious internal investigation.
So if you work for the division that investigates people that work for any division, I guess you can feel like you're invincible, that you'll find out if you're being investigated.
So, yeah, he was one of those, according to this Ars Technica story, who watched the Watchers.
He appears to have had supreme confidence in his own ability to avoid detection should he decide to go rogue.
Stupid mistakes made by other idiots would not be difficult for me to avoid, he once wrote.
Oh, how many times have I heard that?
DIA wouldn't even launch an investigation of him without him knowing something was up, as we said.
Now, Latch earned a cybersecurity degree from Florida Polytechnic in 2018,
and he soon found himself with access to serious government secrets at DIA.
Which he joined in 2019.
He eventually had not only a top-secret clearance, but was also read into various, quote-unquote, special access programs,
some of the government's deepest secrets.
He appears to have been relatively gruntled about his work.
And I'm sorry, I just have to stop there and say that one sentence has been all over the internet this past week.
Just people love that sentence.
He appears to have been relatively gruntled about his work.
I've never used it in my life.
I'm just enjoying saying it right now.
But for the purposes of people who might not know, obviously, disgruntled means you're not happy with something.
So if you're gruntled, I guess that means you're happy?
Is that a way of saying it?
Alex, does that make sense to you?
It does make sense to me.
And it's interesting, too, that you hear the words gruntled and disgruntled used very often in the context of federal employees,
because it was always a disgruntled postal work.
I hear that.
I've never heard gruntled before.
Yeah, gruntled is very unusual.
And I'm not sure if it's some kind of neologism or something like that,
but, you know, that came out of the word disgruntled.
But it's certainly interesting.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Gila.
Gruntled apparently roots back to the 1600s.
Oh, it hasn't been used since then, I guess.
It's coming back now.
Yeah, but apparently gruntled, 1500s, 1600s, it meant something different, but, yeah.
It meant something different?
Apparently it came from the word grumble.
Okay.
Is kind of where it came from.
But, yeah, I mean, it has become more popular, I think, as disgruntled came into use.
But gruntled as a word has existed since the 1500s.
It doesn't look like a word that means happy.
Gruntled.
It looks like a word that means you're upset about something.
But, anyway, let's move on.
So, yeah, he had been relatively gruntled about his work,
but the political upheavals of the last decade shook his faith in what America stood for
and the objectives his work was serving.
And by March of this year, Latch had achieved full disgruntlement
and allegedly sent an anonymous email to a, quote,
friendly foreign government, unquote.
And there's relatively few of those left.
Offering to share classified information with them.
The email said that the recent actions of the current administration are extremely disturbing to me.
I do not agree or align with the values of this administration
and intend to act to support the values that the United States at one time stood for.
And, you know, admirable statement.
I agree with that.
It's just the way he went about it, probably not the smartest thing to do.
The FBI, and this is the weird part, the FBI was soon provided with this email.
I guess whoever he contacted, contacted the FBI.
They quickly found out that Latch was not nearly as good a security as he thought he was.
And what this story did was go over the various mistakes there.
So if you're somebody currently working in a government agency with a name like, what were they again?
The Insider Threat Division.
Yeah, if you're working for somebody like that and you're feeling less gruntled than usual,
keep in mind these things, because these are the mistakes he made.
Redaction fail.
The anonymous email included two photos, including the front and back of a U.S. government ID card
of the kind used in the intelligence agency.
Now, while he removed his name and photo, there was other information there that was not redacted
on one of the U.S. government IDs, and law enforcement was able to determine
that the U.S. government ID belonged to him through that.
I don't know why you needed to send an ID in the first place.
Obviously, that's very, very dangerous.
Then email address.
The FBI quickly gained access to the quote-unquote anonymous email address used to send the message.
They found that on the day that this account was set up, it received a message from a second
email account, possibly as a test, which turned out to be one of Latch's and contained his name
as part of the email address.
That right there, that's all you need, really.
But there's more.
The email account, the second email account, when the FBI examined it, had been set up
using Latch's full name, date of birth, and phone number.
Yeah.
Then the IP address.
Both the first and second email account had been logged into from the same IP address,
suggesting they were controlled by the same person.
And the IP address that was used for them both resolved to Latch's residence.
I almost, you know, I feel sorry for her at this point.
Boy, so much he could have learned.
Yeah.
Now, he, to his credit, suggested moving the conversation to an encrypted messaging platform,
but that was after all this had happened.
So, yeah, kind of not the best idea.
Um, I'm not sure what it was he offered.
I'm not sure what it was, uh, that, um, he was, um, going to, um, uh, give to this friendly
government, uh, extraordinarily stupid thing to do.
Uh, and I feel bad.
I feel bad that somebody, uh, whose heart was in the right place, realizing that, um, very
bad things are going on and somebody has to do something, um, put himself in jeopardy
in this way.
And I don't know what's going to happen with this administration.
Anything is possible.
Uh, I do know there are a lot more people like that and I hope they make better decisions
and I hope they're more successful.
Does anybody want to offer their opinions on this?
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah, sure.
I can jump in as a former federal employee.
I, I guess I can sense that type of frustration that this person may have had.
And I think they're in, they had their intentions in the right place, but they should have known
better, especially having gone through the security clearance processing to obtain what
was, what is presumably TSSCI or top secret with sense, with access to sensitive compartmented
information, especially if you had access to what, what appeared to be compartmented levels
of, uh, programs and kind of special access programs and things like that.
So, you know, this is somebody who should have been familiar with the ordinary channels
for whistleblowing types of activities.
But I do sympathize with him in a sense because you have the Trump administration having terminated
lots of the inspector generals of the various agencies and departments, and it probably feels
like a very unsafe place to be a whistleblower or to disclose this type of information over
to the media, uh, for example.
So maybe he thought handing it over to a foreign government that's also used to handling classified
information would be the most secure way of doing this.
But in, in so doing that, he made himself into a counterintelligence threat to the United
States and seems to have been very easily picked up.
So it's, it's tough.
And, and I do, I just have to say, you know, I think there are a lot of people who are just
leaving government, uh, because they disagree with the actions of the administration.
You know, we see that quite a bit within FBI and elsewhere.
Or because they're getting fired.
Or because they're getting fired as well.
But it just, there aren't a lot of avenues left for these people to blow the whistle.
That's a, that's a really, really big problem.
This is an important thing to remember.
We're saying classified information.
When you say that, you know, you think the worst, you think, you know, missiles and all
kinds of, of security things.
This could have been something that we want to know about, that we should know about something
incredibly corrupt and evil, uh, that he was trying to get out.
And we don't know what that is.
It, you know, we don't know.
It could be anything.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yeah.
It's, uh, I'm also fascinated by the Ars Technica, uh, Ars Technica article here goes into how he
got busted.
Um, basically the FBI had a sting operation set up, uh, posing as the friendly country he was
trying to contact.
And so they told him, yeah, go get us some data.
Um, they watched him on video, uh, copying data into notebooks by hand, uh, tearing the
pages off and stuffing them in his socks.
And, uh, then he wrote up his notes, stored them on a thumb drive and dropped them as requested
by his contact, who was really a fed, um, out in the park.
And he had told his contact, and this is kind of a heartbreaking quote.
He told his contact that he wasn't seeking money, but quote, citizen, citizenship for your country,
because he didn't expect things here to improve in the longterm, even the, in the event that
there is a change in the future.
And just, uh, reading those words, I know so many people who feel like this right now.
I know so many people who are giving up, or at least very much considering giving up because
the fight seems so overwhelming right now.
It's very easy to feel, um, isolated in this.
It's very easy to feel alone in wanting to make things better.
And it's very easy to kind of fall down your own rabbit hole, um, do something stupid like
this and suffer the consequences.
And it's, uh, my, my heart does go out to this guy because it seems like his heart was
in the right place.
Even if his head was right up as, you know, anyway, let's try and keep, let's try and keep
track of, of where the story goes, because we shouldn't forget about people that do things
like this.
And hopefully people make better decisions, but you know, to answer your point, Rob, um, a lot
of people are feeling this way.
I'm feeling this way.
Many of us are, um, you feel better when you know, there are more people that understand
that feel the same way.
You know, uh, Kyle and I were driving the other day.
We came upon a demonstration just in the middle of nowhere, a demonstration against all of this
crap that's going on.
We didn't know about this.
It's, it's an organization called indivisible, uh, indivisible.org is their website, but there
were a lot of people on the street and, and, and every car passing was, was honking support.
This is on long Island.
You know, you would think that it was, it would be something a bit more hostile towards
them.
I felt so good after seeing that we need to do this more.
We need to, uh, reach out to people more and, um, and, and just be comforting because
that's super important.
And by the way, June 14th flag day, also Trump's birthday and the anniversary of the, uh, army
or Navy or one of them, uh, that's when this big military parade is supposed to be happening
in, in Washington, DC.
There is a groundswell of opposition to that kind of militarization of our society because,
you know, that kind of thing doesn't happen here.
And now all of a sudden it's going to start happening.
People are planning all sorts of things for that day.
So it's, it's going to get interesting.
Kyle.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I believe specifically that's the no Kings action on that day.
And, um, we've advocated, and I think, uh, many people are thinking the same way that
the way these things will thrive is through spontaneity.
And, um, but, but with, uh, a dash of, of, uh, classic sort of organization, cause you
have to, you have to have a way to get the word out and to get numbers, you know, get a
lot of people to actually show up.
Uh, but in, uh, smaller actions distributed all over the country, there's a lot of power,
a lot of visibility because you, um, in the case of what we saw, you are presenting opposition,
maybe, uh, during someone's commute home.
Um, those people may be inclined, but may not realize, uh, politically inclined to, uh,
a lie with, or, or agree with some of what you're, you're protesting, but they may not
feel as much support.
So it is, it is, uh, ongoing and you may not know, may not be aware of it.
You kind of have to dig for some of this stuff, but, um, groups like Indivisible have a pretty
good mapping and, um, uh, news alerts.
And, uh, if maybe not you directly, but someone in one of your smaller organizations is on the
list or, uh, subscribes to some of that, they'll get the word out to you.
And those kinds of things, that word of mouth can be really, really powerful.
Or if you see an action going on, ask, how do I find out more?
How do I find out when the next one is, uh, that simple gesture will, will probably, um,
get you exactly what you need as far as, uh, the who, what, when, and where.
And, um, anybody who wants to inform us about stuff that is going on, um, or news around ways
to organize or tips for, um, becoming more visible in the face of some of this onerous
stuff, um, uh, specifically surveillance.
I know we're going to get to that later.
Um, please write us OTH at 2600.com and we'll air it here.
Um, especially stuff around surveillance and privacy and keeping people safe when they
are exercising their rights.
You know, something else, uh, that, uh, I know a lot of people have been super frustrated
with, uh, is what's going on, uh, with immigration, with, uh, especially immigration courts where
people showing up for their hearings to become citizens of this country, uh, are after their
hearings being ambushed by armed thugs.
I have no other word for it, uh, that basically throw them into a van and take them away someplace.
We never know where, and sometimes it's, uh, to somewhere in Texas, sometimes it's to El
Salvador.
Uh, it's a nightmare.
It's an absolute nightmare.
And it's making people afraid, uh, to, uh, show their faces and to, um, um, uh, be at the
hearings that they are legally entitled to be at.
You know, uh, the, the, uh, the whole, uh, system is, is being bypassed.
I did a little bit of digging, not much at all.
I just looked on the, um, the justice department's website, justice.gov.
And I was able to find every single immigration court is listed there.
And not only that, but you can, um, listen to all of the hearings that take place.
There is a single phone number.
I'm going to give you a phone number because it's on their website.
Uh, it's area code 415.
That's the Bay area 527-5035.
And all you have to do is pick a judge in a court and every judge has a code.
I don't mean a code of justice.
I mean a code for the phone.
Uh, for instance, uh, looking at New York here, uh, I see we have, um, the Broadway immigration
court, uh, which is, uh, located at, uh, Ted Weiss federal building, 290 Broadway 15th
floor.
Uh, we have the federal plaza immigration court, 26 federal plaza, 12th floor room 1237.
We have the Verrick immigration court, 201 Verrick street, fifth floor room 507.
I imagine they have more than one room for courts because they have a lot of judges, but,
uh, you know, if we want to pick one, for instance, in the Broadway immigration court,
uh, let's see, uh, John Burns, uh, his code is one nine nine nine five four one four zero nine.
I'm not giving out any secret information.
It's right there on their own website.
Now there are several things you can do.
You can listen to the hearings to see if the hearings are, are fair, uh, and to see how
they're treating people.
You can also show up at these places because it makes the, the work of ice so much harder
if there's a mob of people in their way.
And a lot of us are, are being surprised by these actions, but this is where the actions
are taking place at the courthouses outside the courtrooms.
And if we are serious about stopping it from happening, well, here are the addresses, justice.gov
look for the immigration courts.
It's all right there.
I don't know how much longer it's going to be there for knowing Trump.
He'll take it down.
Uh, but that's why we have archive.org and please support them too, because, uh, they
are absolutely magical.
Um, but yeah, um, you can, uh, access, uh, internet based hearings, um, of, of any court.
Um, and all the information, all the, uh, instructions are, are, are there.
Alex, did you know that this existed?
Alex?
Yes, I did.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was going to be there for a second.
Um, yeah, it's quite, it's quite interesting, but I think it's a really important call to
action here because it allows public participation in these types of, um, proceedings.
I wouldn't say participation.
I guess it allows for transparency, right?
You're supposed to be silent and watch and listen.
To these types of things.
But yeah, I think it's really important.
And it's, you know, a lot of these proceedings are, are very highly accessible, whether you're
in a federal court or state court, an immigration court, and, uh, and we should be watching and
listening.
Yeah.
And the idea of ambushing somebody who is going through legal channels to resolve their situation,
it's just so sleazy and horrible.
You know, I, I am all for somebody who is wanted for a crime and I'm not talking about
simply existing in this country being the crime.
I'm talking about violent criminals, people who are wanted.
Yes.
I don't think anybody's going to argue that those people should be, uh, um, um, found,
intercepted and prevented from, from, uh, walking around on the streets and, and, uh, victimizing
more people.
But we're talking about families here.
We're talking about, uh, people who like our ancestors have, uh, simply look for a better
way of life and, uh, they're, they're following the rules.
They're doing everything right.
And they are being treated like criminals by people who are not part of that particular
court system.
And, you know, they even arrested a judge for trying to protect one of the people that she
had a hearing for, you know, in a courtroom, the judge, uh, says what goes, you know, anything
that, that they decree, that's the way it is.
That's how judges are.
And, um, to introduce this, um, this, this new element of armed stormtroopers outside that
are going to grab the person that you give a particular amount of time before the next
hearing to, it's just, it's against everything that this country stands for.
Alex, go ahead.
Let me have one more story.
It's part of this tripartite and highly deplorable attack on the justice system itself.
I mean, we've seen the administration target judges.
We've seen them target separation of powers.
We've seen them target lawyers.
We've seen them target law firms.
Why, why would they stop there?
You want to go for the individual litigants as well, make them afraid to even show up
in court, make it an access to justice issue here.
I mean, this is just a part and parcel of, I think a wholesale attack on the entire system
of justice that we have come to understand in this country.
They want people to feel uneasy.
They want to instill a sense of disquietude for anybody who is showing up to one of these
proceedings because they don't want you to, they don't want you to participate in this.
You have to think about the legal system as something that is really, it's a matter of
publicly funded dispute resolution.
Now, it's our taxpayers that pay for this, that we should feel safe in those buildings
and we should respect the judicial officials and their orders.
And this is something that is not happening and it's coming from on high and it's extraordinarily
dangerous precedent.
Well, we have the constitution on our side and we have a lot of people on our side, so
we need to start using both and clogging up this mechanism that is being abused.
All right.
We have one final story, but it's a big story and it's a story we're going to be coming
back to many, many times.
It's about this organization, company, corporation, whatever you want to call them, called Palantir.
You all heard of them?
Yeah, in March, they've been around for a while, Trump signed an executive order two
months ago, three months ago, calling for the federal government to share data across
agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information
on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Yeah, because the Trump administration has been expanding Palantir's work across the federal
government in the last couple of months.
Now, the company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since
Trump took office, including additional funds from existing contracts, as well as new contracts
with DHS and the Pentagon.
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies, Social Security
Administration, Internal Revenue Service, about buying its technology.
According to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions,
they're putting a key Palantir product known as Foundry into at least four federal agencies,
DHS, the Health and Human Services Department, among others.
And basically, the idea of creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data
is not just a pipe dream.
The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens
and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of
their student debt, their medical claims, any disability status.
Now, Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants
and punishing critics.
It's not much of a reach to get to this conclusion.
Privacy advocates, student unions, labor rights movements, organizations either have filed lawsuits
to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people's personal
information.
What do you think?
Look at their actions.
Of course, they're going to weaponize it.
Of course, they're going to abuse it.
Now, some current and former Palantir employees have been unnerved by the work.
The company risks becoming the face of Trump's political agenda and could be vulnerable if data
on Americans is breached or hacked.
Correction, when it's breached or hacked.
Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged
database of personal information rests with Trump and not the firm.
Have to disagree on that.
You're providing the ingredients to do this, and you can't disavow any responsibility.
Now, this month, 13 former employees signed a letter urging Palantir to stop its endeavors
with Trump, Linda Zia, a signee who was a Palantir engineer until last year, said the problem was
not with the company's technology, but with how the Trump administration intended to use
it.
Again, you know, we have been saying this for decades, that the technology is neutral.
It's how it's used.
And every bit of good technology is also going to be used for evil.
You can't just pretend you're discovering this now.
When you create something, when you invent something, assume it's going to be used by
the most evil people on earth and ask yourself if that's worth pursuing, because guaranteed
it's going to fall into their hands.
Kyle.
Yeah.
And let's not forget that this is for profit.
So they want to make money doing this.
And I'm not going to tell people what to do, but I will say what I think.
I don't think they deserve this business model.
I think the company itself should be disintegrated, like just basically crippled, however that
happens, legal and otherwise.
And I think that their technology should be involuntarily open sourced or freed up so that
everyone can do what they will with this innovation and they can go the way of the dustbin.
I mean, yeah, yeah, definitely.
This is rape.
It's digital data rape.
It has been described that way.
It has been described that way.
And it's of a nature that I don't think we have seen before.
And it's terrifying, a number of people.
Yes, Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, I tend to agree with Kyle on a lot of these points here.
I mean, this is something that's not neutral.
I mean, for them to say, we're building tools, this is a hammer.
What you do with it is totally different.
I mean, let's be very clear.
They're building really sophisticated tools that enable data integration and analytics.
And those tools are going to amplify the reach of these abhorrent policies, these policies
that infringe on civil liberties, these policies that enable things like mass surveillance and
profiling of American citizens, infringing our civil liberties, infringing our civil rights,
invading our privacy rights.
This crazy tools, not policy argument is really a little bit of sophistry, I think, to deflect
any measure of ethical responsibility.
This is a totally insane argument.
And there are so many issues that go along with this Palantir Trump administration expansion
of these powers and the integration of this data.
There are, I think, going to be a copious amount of legal challenges, hopefully coming
from organizations like the ACLU and the EFF, about this type of authoritarian overreach,
about violations of the Privacy Act, about violations of the E-Government Act.
You know, we as citizens, even though we don't have necessarily an overarching federal privacy
legislation, we still do have the Privacy Act of 1974 that allows us to access records that
the government holds about individual citizens.
I think this will make it extraordinarily difficult for us to exercise those rights.
And I think that this practice, if it goes forward without any kind of meaningful oversight
body, would arguably violate that law, as well as maybe half a dozen others.
Go ahead, Kyle.
I just want to build on the Privacy Act comment.
This should usher in a tsunami of the most enormous, massive privacy legislation this country
has ever seen.
And we, I'm tired of this.
We are tired of this.
These companies have been allowed to do this kind of stuff.
They've created, what is it?
Surveillance capitalism.
These, these, all of these things we talked about as ad nauseum.
I'm tired of it.
We're tired of it collectively.
And we've talked about enacting privacy legislation very much like other parts of the world have.
And it has not gotten over our political hurdles or the sort of social will if they get their
way and if it doesn't, I'd be really disappointed if they get their way, it very much should.
It ought to be what pushes this idea of privacy as a right and, and, and putting it to law for Americans.
It should usher it in.
I mean, it should be the straw that breaks the camel's back in this scenario.
This is something that I don't think it's a left or right issue.
I think anybody who cares about privacy and freedom would be outraged by the potential
that's being unleashed here.
Now, Palantir was, was founded back in 2013 by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, which are names
I think people might recognize we don't have time to really go into that now, but a lot
of baggage and a lot of questions are, are, are being asked about all this.
But can anyone sum up in the, in the two minutes we have just maybe something that would wake
people up as to why this is more of a threat than all of the other privacy intrusions that
we have seen.
Alex, go ahead.
I mean, this is, this is really crazy.
When you have the aggregation of such type of such sensitive data, when you have banking
information, student loans, medical claims, things like disability status, data from multiple
federal agencies aggregated into some single analytical platform that the administration
has access to, this could result in, you know, no joke, unprecedented government surveillance
capabilities.
You know, things like, you know, real-time monitoring of our transactions, of our locations,
you know, this is really, really crazy.
This could begin to resemble something like China's social credit system, where you have
this authoritarian regime constantly monitoring what its citizens are doing, especially if
this, if this information is going to be shared with law enforcement, with ICE, this could
erode our Fourth Amendment expectations if challenges are not brought against this type of action
rather quickly and forcefully as, as Kyle had, I think, rightfully suggested.
And I think one of the things to also think about here, too, is a lot of loyal supporters
of Trump have actually signaled their, their displeasure with this type of thing, because
even they are concerned about a massive national database about U.S. citizens.
And this is something that we have to stay on top of.
We're out of time now, but we are certainly going to continue this discussion both on Overtime,
which immediately follows this program, on YouTube.
Go to 2600.com, look at the link at the top of the page, or just go to Channel 2600 on YouTube
and join us there.
Or keep listening to Off the Hook every Wednesday night from 7 to 8 here on WBAI.
And we'll be discussing that more in the future.
Let's create consequences.
I like that.
I like that.
That's a bumper sticker.
A little long, but we can make it work.
All right, everyone, you're not alone.
We're out there.
We'll see you soon.
Good night.
Good night.
Well, did you see the old man outside the seaman's mission?
Memories are fighting with the medals that he wears.
And did you see the old man outside the seaman's mission?
And he's just another hero from a land that doesn't care.
So how can you tell me you're lonely?
And don't you say to me, your sun don't shine?
And have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London?
And she ain't got no money, and she's all dressed in rags.
And have you seen the old girl who walks the streets of London?
And she carries her old knickers into parlour being fair.
So how can you tell me you're lonely?
And don't you say to me, your sun don't shine?
Well, let me take you by the hand
And lead you through your streets of London
And I'll show you something you'll never understand
Well, let me take you by the hand
And drag you through your streets of London
And I'll show you something that'll make you really sick
Ha!
Thank you.


and welcome everybody to off the hook overtime here on youtube i think everything is working
this week um yes i made it kyle you made it made what uh yeah okay and uh wow it looks like all of
you are in the same room even though you're not rob gila and alex you all made it to uh
to youtube we made it over we did we are here and we're actually broadcasting on youtube
we are indeed and we sound good okay now um uh a couple of things some some housekeeping here
uh rebel if you're out there you can't call this week and if you do call this week there'll be
further penalties uh because you you double called last week and we told you not to do that
um we quested we don't tell people things but you know for god's sake it's it's it's not hard
um we are going to um uh demonstrate something we're doing a lot of work kyle has has uh really
busted hidden various parts of his anatomy about fixing things and um the um the hum that we uh
wait a minute why is the hum here again it was gone before the show we tested this
do you hear this kyle that's a loud hum that wasn't there before
you know and i wonder now if this is somebody in the phone company is just
out there uh winding me up we we had a beautiful sound sounding phone line we did we tested this
we spent up to an hour testing this um kyle i'm in your hands what do i do don't we uh proceed
with a hum uh shoot ourselves in the head yeah i guess we could do that um is there maybe something
to touch that would make this go away uh wow this is unbelievable um the only thing that's different
is we have you guys your the signal people but i don't think that would cause it no well i don't
know what to say um guys talk amongst yourselves while we try and figure this out
especially if you have more people on the system now it seems like there's some kind of
something going on with voltage i don't know what do you think rob i am uh i am just terribly
curious but uh not knowing more about the particular hardware situation going on um i i don't want to
advance any uh any theories that make it sound like i do but i'm wondering if it's a it's if it's a
level of hum that we could uh get away with and uh still conduct our our phone calls in our show
yeah i mean if that's it it's not terrible yeah it's not terrible i do wonder if it's because
there are now more of us in in the pots and that is um you know taxing the system a little bit um but
since we do seem to have a moment i would like to take this opportunity to say hello to the 24 people
who are with us right now on youtube um i would also like to just point something out um which is
that my last name is not now nor has it ever been monster uh just to clarify and nor has it been
firefly is it also has never been firefly on the chat before the show uh yes um so um emmanuel we do
have a suggestion that we need a caller to see if there will be a hum yeah uh no kidding as long
as they don't complain if they complain i'm out yeah we don't like that's very fair we don't like
constant complaints but you know uh you know we tested this we we we we sweated over this um we were
uh going to do a test call of our of our own should we even try doing that kyle or well i don't
understand how i'm going to answer and be on the phone in the other room that's a good point i didn't
think of that i mean i could tell you what button to pick up the call but well no i thought i'd pick
up that but we're not using that phone again i just wonder what part of this phantom conversation
we had about this uh that was cleared up i guess the part you weren't listening to
uh all right well regardless um let's uh let's let's discuss any more uh details about the palantir
story that we wanted to get out before uh we we ran out of time and then we can open up the phone
the phone lines i think my concern is general and it's you know part of it is the the peter
teal of it all but this whole idea that so many people who got into public service as public service
are being driven out in so many ways and this whole idea that everything is commodifiable and
you're seeing more people in the for-profit sphere moving into government you know is everything
a public good or is it a commodity and please understand i'm by no means saying this kind of
surveillance system is a public good but are there things that exist like say i don't know the post
office that don't exist solely to make money and to create profit um that i think is part of the
danger here for me also the fact that you know we've got the palantir guys and the clearview ai guys
and there's so much consonants in that also that venn diagram is not huge um worries me a bit yeah i
mean there are definitely solid reasons why um government and the direct operation of government
has been decoupled from commercial interests for a long time and uh we have seen the the the complete uh i
guess devastation of the public sphere as an entity with doge and with everything else and just with
the whole general turn these things have taken and we're seeing capital capitalist interests directly
affecting handling directing um these these movements of government and uh it's it's not just like
in the old days which were like a few years ago now you know you would have you would have
companies constantly lobbying um public servants to take their side in things and make things easier
for them and now they seem to have just cut out that middleman because the public sector is being
uh slashed and burned and uh the you know there's the old uh chestnut about uh private industry
um you know the government doesn't know what it's doing because it pays a hundred dollars for a hammer
and uh five hundred dollars for a toilet seat but in that equation has always been it's been private
industry charging the government five hundred dollars for a toilet seat and making sure that they could
get away with doing that and so those toilet seats are now in direct control and that has never been
good for us the information uh environment out there has been controlled so much of it has been
controlled by commercial interests for so long and seeing it uh seep into the government um at this level
is terrifying uh if i break in here uh kyle's gone down the hallway to a payphone to uh call us and
test out our our phone line and see if we can hear him kyle are you there hello is this is this off
the hook overtime uh we don't hear you hello you're very very low okay um we hear you i think from the
hallway i don't think we hear you on the on the air at all all right uh wow this is unbelievable
i can slightly hear him yeah it's so low it's so incredibly low it's like it's like the board
self-sabotaged itself because we i turned it down because the hum was so loud oh i thought you fixed
the hum you turned everything down i turned the gang down uh-huh channel all right i'm bringing you
way up now as as high up as i can physically go and and the hum is very very loud now i'm sure it is
oh this is ridiculous this is this is awful i don't hear the hum you don't hear the hum you do
not hear the hum all right well maybe the hum is just for us um yeah and you're listening on youtube
right i mean is this usable no you're too low you have to be louder really yeah you have to be louder
this this is i mean we're currently listening on signal and we can't hear it yeah we can hear touch
tones if you want to just communicate with touch tones that's fine but voice is going to be a
problem okay well off the hook overtime is my favorite show yeah it's it's it's it's falling
pretty fast for me in popularity because we invest so much in this and and it keeps sabotaging us
um all right i'm gonna turn this down now um okay we've checked with the youtube listeners and
uh they can hear kyle but they can hear the hum um and yeah they can hear the hum they can barely
hear kyle wait why why is it you don't hear the hum and they do you're listening to the same thing
we're not though we're listening to what you're sending us on signal i asked you if you're listening
to youtube that's what you need to listen to yeah obviously it's right well we can't we can't
listen to both because of the uh delay yeah well there's two of you one of you it doesn't matter
the point is we have a hum and we have low audio this is not going to work so uh let's just talk
amongst ourselves and we'll send this thing out for repairs or god knows what how about now um what do
i do bring the phone up yeah i hear a dial tone and a hum yeah well that's nice okay would it would it
be helpful if i stepped into another room and uh you called my phone or we called you're called
or we or we call the uh the the show's line and uh so kyle can be there looking at the equipment
rather than away on the phone yeah uh that's up to kyle
yeah i i really don't think uh i can really help much more yeah on air without it just being about
that i i really wish we could just speak over it for the time being because all right let's try to
occupy more let's try to call the hours of my day let's see how bad it is 802-321-4225
but if it's torture we're not going to continue yeah i don't even want to describe what i did i mean we
we switched back to the previous hybrid we were using and yeah it's just it ends up being about this
like technical stuff that people who aren't going to do anything will invariably tell us we're doing
wrong i don't care what you think all right let's not be a jerk look they can't do anything they're
not here so we can't blame people not doing anything uh regardless uh 802-321-4225 um and uh
you know is it possible something got warm and overheated and now it's starting to hum because it
wasn't before i swear to god we tested this it sounded so great we were so happy and uh if if
we sound bitter and angry it's because we feel like the board has uh stabbed us in the back and
it's just not fair and it is possible like back in the old days in the analog days my my house phone
used to fluctuate in uh utility with the weather and it was terribly annoying can i can i point out
one other thing kyle um you apparently turned the ringer off because i didn't hear the phone ringing
and you don't hear the phone ringing now if it is ringing so um that's an important point
okay is the phone ringing cool is the phone ringing do we have a call uh i don't know i
bypassed certain things but yeah the ringer's back on okay so if somebody calls up 802-321-4225 we will
hear the ringer and uh pick it up and see just how how bad this is i think people are tuning in just to
see what goes wrong each week at this point yeah build a radio station in your spare time
yes kyle uh has has had a long day and um i understand i do yes the the efforts of uh the
efforts of everyone um in front of behind the scenes and our listenership are appreciated in uh helping us
uh get through this so yeah if you're out there give us a call 802-321-4225 and uh help us figure this
stuff out i hate to argue with you rob but don't do that now because somebody called us
and oh great you won't get through good evening you're on off the hook over time
hey good evening hi speak as loud as you're comfortable speaking okay uh can you hear me
okay not really can anybody hear this person no nobody no okay uh i mean i can hear you but it's
very and i don't think anybody else can so we can have a private conversation okay um i was just
gonna ask if you have any books to recommend along the lines of corey doctora so in response to
companies like palantir um committing and supporting what i think are highly unethical
activities any books to recommend uh in the order of corey doctora type books uh for uh companies like
palantir we're doing horribly wrong things and i'll i'll leave that to uh our our signal group to uh
um mindfuck by chris wiley is pretty good he was one of the cambridge analytica whistleblowers like
worked for them it's along the lines of that because cambridge analytica was using this um api that
facebook allowed to um scrape up stuff and influence politics in many other countries and then they
they're like um uh experience in those countries was then applied to elections here in our own and
it kind of it totally blurred the line between sort of campaign techniques and and um sort of uh
rigging the system so yeah mindfuck's pretty good but i don't know a whole lot uh um that would be in
the realm of corey doctora i know he's written extensively about some of this stuff and there are
many other fantastic authors out there also uh covering these kinds of things and um there was
let's see some of the uh i think daily show had a woman on there that uh talked about um a lot of
this early on i can't remember her name but i know the book was how to survive the broligarchy
and uh that segment's really good if you didn't watch the daily show this um earlier this week that
her interview is really good and she was um very early on uh writing about
kind of a lot of this stuff on the horizon i i don't i can't paraphrase it that i just looked up
her name her name is carol cod cow i don't know how to say this cad wilder uh spelled c-a-d-w-a-l-l-a-d-r
you do better uh and she wrote a book called roligarchs ai in a techno authoritarian surveillance
state and yes she was on a daily show on monday so i think that's on youtube you can just watch
the whole thing and the title i said was probably the second book that she's written sort of following
up with all of that but um beyond that there there are many different subjects that intersect
with this and it's really come to a head because the affordability and the prevalence of all this
data um has made it really tempting for these people to build on the kinds of surveillance capitalism
that would have like sold you socks if you need socks right now or whatever uh to now like um
harnessing it and and selling it to governments to uh do their authoritarian bidding and i don't
think it's fair i we were tired of it when we were being sold socks when we needed socks because like
that should be up to us and we we see enough ads and targeted ads you know may be helpful but it's
also annoying and creepy to some people and um i'll just say this while i'm talking i just i want
people in relative comfort i'm talking about c-suite millionaires and billionaires if this is going
to be class warfare like okay let's let's make it warfare like this stuff should be wielded right
back at these people i want to know where peter teal is i want to know where his yacht is right now
you know i want to know where uh carp is i can find out you want me to do that all these ceos are at
every instant just as much as they want to know where we are and selling it to people i'll do it for
free i've got a title on a satellite i'll get on it right now but you know what i'm saying so so
anyway please read please share what you do find if you find titles uh oth at 2600.com if you find
some good titles um please share that with us so we can spread that yeah um just in the realm of
dystopian fiction there is so much out there uh dr o is one of the main ones that i recommend to
people but also you know it's uh it's even a bit cliched to recommend folks like william gibson
or philip k dick because they're just so foundational to the genre but also they're
written by very very intelligent people who are technically literate and who see things coming um
and uh can can speculate about the worst of these things um the handmaid's tale by margaret atwood
um uh even uh you know snow crash by neil stephenson um go back uh to the 19th century and you can read
the machine stops by em forster and just all these ways in which the the the surveillance environment
the technical environment can uh be pushed to extremes that are horrifying and yet not so not so uh sci-fi
unrealistic as maybe they once were i hope that helped yeah thank you so much all right thanks
for you thanks for your call yeah it's good good hearing your voice all in the distance and we
appreciate that thank you for the i'm sorry thank you very much for the appreciated yes we appreciate
that um i had a thought what if we turn something off that's on and maybe it'll it'll maybe when it
turns on it's i don't know okay let me go down to the circuit breaker no i don't i mean i mean this
this doohickey here you know uh whatever that is uh this is out of the loop this is outside of the
old hybrid this is the battery powered one okay um i could fumble around and try to switch back to
that but i gotta move phones i gotta do a couple things did did we have the hum with that one we
had somewhat of a hum all right i'll switch back to that one switch back to that one let's see if
the hum is any better and then give me a sec if it's not then we can switch back to the other one
which has been turned off isn't this fun it's fun i'm having fun this this is our life really fun
this is what we do super fun oh yes okay i've i've got something we could talk about if we need to
talk about something else while we're not talking about the um phone yes and people please don't call
while we're doing this because uh it won't go anywhere because actually i'm sort of mad
um i just got an email welcome to hulu perks say what the hell is hulu perks welcome to hulu perks
are you saying perks or parks perks our new rewards program oh lucky you what in the hell
is a and we've discussed this i live for awards program in ways that probably make me a very
significant security risk i hand over my personal information all the time if it'll get me a free
cup of coffee why and why your information free cup of coffee yeah but you can say anything to them
you don't have to give you real info no i understand that but i'm saying like if i um get
you know if it's by 12 cups of dunkin donuts coffee or 12 purchases of dunkin donuts over the course of a
month and i get double points going forward yes i will make 12 purchases of dunkin donuts over the
course of a month and i carry it on my phone and it's on the app and i gave them my birthday because
i get free stuff for my birthday and i recognize i am actively signing up for participation in the
surveillance state because i get free stuff and i like it that they know my name and but
okay so what do we got here i don't know i'm just i'm thrown by this um
and okay see all perks and how are they going to time out how long we're on the app like
i don't want to go to lalapalooza i don't want to go to comic-con i certainly don't want microsoft
rewards okay so these are these are things they're throwing you is this because i just mentioned the
handmaid's tale on the radio stranger things have happened an exclusive hulu perk from rare beauty
inspired by only murders in the building what the fuck is this
i do not understand sorry okay all right um here's something else that will uh that will tweak neurons
um we have been we have had it suggested uh we have we have been challenged by someone in the youtube chat
and this challenge is something that we get a lot of on this program and uh always have
and uh this is uh tom says i challenge oth and overtime to talk about hacking and not politics for one week
okay i challenge you to tell us what about the show that we just did is not about hacking
seriously do you agree rob no i i i fully i i agree with you we talked about about someone's phone
getting hacked we we we talked about ways to to uh get yourself into court hearings we talked about
about surveillance technology you know i'm sorry if it doesn't align with your political views or if
you're uncomfortable that we're talking about things that that are unpleasant but that's reality
everything we do has a link to the hacker community and we make that link so please you know we're not
going to just pretend everything's all fine and uh and and just talk about the things that that
interest our demographic that's that's never what we've done go back to the very beginning of off the
hook and and we have always paid attention what's going on in the outside world now again you might not
agree and that's fine and you're welcome to not agree you're welcome to have a voice as well
that's that's that's dialogue and that's something we need to uh have a bit more of in this place
this is something that we've gotten not just on this show but uh 2600 magazine the hope conference
um all of it it's like um there will always be someone saying it's too political but i it was it has
always been a fundamental aspect of myself as a hacker um a fundamental aspect of my hacker worldview
that notices the things that are wrong in the sphere of politics and how we can use hacker um
thinking to try and better it to try and solve it because as a hacker i look at the stuff around me and
i want to see if i can fix the bits that are broken and the political sphere is a very big broken bit
in all of our lives and i don't think it behooves any of us to try and put our heads in the sand and
ignore what's going on and uh just limit the hacker discussions to like i want to make my computer run
games faster or something so go ahead sorry go ahead well i just wanted to say you know uh i don't want
to uh give the wrong impression i appreciate this conversation i appreciate the question we're having
an interesting conversation but this is a political conversation too that you brought on so you know it's
it's it's what is happening and you can't ever ignore what's happening around you
it's important to discuss it to acknowledge it to make it better and and you can be a part of that
by challenging us we do appreciate that alex you know i'm i've always like to take the contrary if
you hear it and i i think there's some validity to what our listener in the youtube channel had stated i
do i think we do tend to to maybe talk about politics as such a little bit too much i can understand
i think it's a valid criticism i do agree on the other hand that technology and politics and societal
ramifications of technology are inextricably linked at this point it's very very difficult to to separate
the two but i but i think there's some validity there you know what if what if instead what if we
had some kind of compromise accommodation here where i don't like the way this sounds but go ahead
yeah what if instead of saying trump we just called him the blfh first of all i think i said trump once
yeah in the last hour i don't like saying that i really don't well we'll just call him the blfh
and yeah wouldn't it be amazing it would be a great article if somebody compared trump to the
bastard operator from hell don't you think yeah yeah alex we'll just have to wait to see somebody does
that go ahead gila like that comes out no i was wondering what that stood for but um
so what's people are obviously responding to this in the chat and tom who kicked this whole thing off
said and i quote oth doesn't need to be another mainstream media spiel which kind of blows my mind
a little bit because i i don't know if that's like an insult or a huge compliment that uh that he
thinks we're mainstream media at this point right but yeah i i think it's very hard to see anything
right now as not tied up in the political moment in which we live um someone responded and said it's
been a while but i sometimes go back and listen to some of the very old shows such less dark times
than now i i don't know how to discuss anything that's going on right now without it becoming
a political situation i would love not to have to talk about that man all the time i don't know how
i i really implore people um study the history of hacking it is inherently a political act you can
maybe argue that you can debate it but it's kind of true it's it's a fact at the outset the way the
account the uh using things in ways they were not intended to be used was itself counter to what was
sort of done or whether you're talking about the phone system or whether you're trying to work
around a particular product's design it's inherently counter to what you're supposed to be doing
and i guess the only compromise i'm going to make is stop telling us what to do why don't you suggest
something that you'd like to hear about we can maybe find some stories about it we can submit a story
that you think is interesting that's so apolitical and bland whatever you know that fits your comfort
zone we're not here to come to be like this comfortable thing for everybody you you've got
to understand how insane that is like we would never talk about anything if everything we talked about
had to be just you know tailored to your your sensitivities but what do you mean then by hacking what
what is hacking to you like these all become very philosophical very quickly hacking is is something
different to different people you could argue that for an hour so yeah i and we have i hear i hear the
point i i hear oh yeah you're you're having trouble with with how uh technologies and computers and
telephones are bleeding into social social and political issues that's not our fault that's how
it is occurring so you can be mad at the occurring you can be you know upset that what you're hearing
isn't what you want to hear but by all means there's plenty of if if you mean like software development
or like hardware design like i think you're thinking about other shows i don't want to turn
you away but i think you should be very like clear-eyed about why you're here uh you're not going to
agree with everything we say and we're certainly not agreeing with everything you say i mean look at
everything just something if you can do better let's hear it well okay uh you know the things we get
involved with um whether it's the magazine whether it's the show whether it's the conferences they
all have political bends to them and uh not all in agreement and that's kind of where we've been
coming from since we began 84 is when the magazine began 94 is when the conference began and the show
began 88 so we've been at this for a while and it's kind of our thing it's kind of how we um uh we we um
tackle the world but we're always open to hearing other perspectives and other other ideas ways of
doing things so you know we we we listen but um i don't think we can be expected to simply not pay
attention to the things that are important to us and you know i i hold the show we just did as an
example to that what would you take out of that that we just discussed every one of those stories
i found fascinating and uh relevant you know very timely all things that are happening right now um
and um you know there are people who would say yeah you shouldn't do that you shouldn't criticize
the powers that be and um that's that might be convenient for certain uh uh for certain uh viewpoints
but we never do what's convenient we do what is on our mind and we never shut anybody up either
if they call in uh if they're on our microphones if they write in we always want to hear that the
fact that we're talking about this right now uh should should should tell you that but i have more
exciting news i think kyle might have actually fixed the uh the the hum you want to tell us before
we we dive into this again everything is the nice version tonight okay yeah the nice version is um
we're gonna try something else be nice we're nice we're nice nice be nice ah yes the southern
hacker hospitality uh yeah i'm ready it's a thing all right yeah it's for real no all right so i'm
going to uh just bring this up without any dial set your expectations i did turn the gain on the
compressor down right now i don't hear any hum yeah but it's not off hook oh so i'm not supposed to
hear a hum okay so now it's off hook okay hit a touch tone so that we can hear oh that's like
snappy it's a snappy hum but i can live with that i can live with that hum i can now you want me to
i'm gonna boost the gain on the compressor or maybe turn it off i don't know which one was
how about now all right captain jane what you got okay hit a uh it's very buzzy hit a touchdown please
it's got a buzz to it yeah it's kind of what do you guys hear out there in in uh signal land
well it's not so bad on signal i uh turned the youtube uh volume up for a minute and the hum is
there but i i i would like to i would like to try this because i think we could probably hear a caller
over it okay i mean we we did isolate when we were troubleshooting we know what it is it is the
uh there's a a auxiliary return from the mic from our uh board this is what sends uh everybody else
like our mics to the caller and that connection is what's causing it so kind of beats me all right
let's take this hi hello hey you sound great i sound great because you sound pretty good yourself
oh that's fantastic um i mean it's there but it it doesn't sound bad i hear a hum but you know what
yeah i have tinnitus so i hear it ringing all the time it's not as good with this in fact the hum kind
of cancels out the tinnitus it's not as buzzy and i was just explaining how we know that this
connection is the auxiliary return for our microphones going to the caller because we
played with the connections you just hang up on me i dropped the telephone i'm sorry
bro don't do that you don't want to break something i'm gonna hang up on you no i'm hanging up on you
all right so it's more or less serviceable we're gonna talk to someone because basically this
um quarter inch is halfway down because it's a stereo quarter inch plug going into one of the
auxiliary returns it might be tip or ring maybe off on it or it's out of phase or something we need
to talk to an engineer i got my quarterback uh or an audio expert did it did actually return it
actually came back wow i'm so happy this is the best thing that's happened to me today save that for
later all right so look let's take a call we'll um we won't be salty we'll be nice well we don't know
that 802-321-4225 yeah you're right why am i making promises nobody knows nobody cares you might
say the wrong thing yeah just call try us yeah yeah come at us yeah come on try us try us out
but that that sounded good though that sounded good here to us on on signal it's not how you make a
phone call that's how you do it yes but try us you might like us absolutely waiting for that call
all right so if you want to give us a call at 802-321-4225 i think we chased everybody away
yeah we don't want to hear from you yeah yeah we don't want your call i'm trying to use reverse
psychology well we told rebel not to call we mean it rebel don't try to rescue us because that would
be bad and then rebel's on notice yeah he's on notice and we'll hear from him next week and we'll
welcome him next week yeah i'm not sure he's even with us this evening um we have not seen him in the
chat what did you do gila what do you mean he's not with us traveling or that's later this summer i
meant that figuratively what i said last week i didn't mean for you to go out and do it whoa
please tell me you didn't that what it was a nod she's supposed to interpret the nod yeah how is it
on the sopranos you can just nod to somebody and they know exactly what you mean you gave the sign
what do you in real life i can tell people through their face what you know something and they're like
well i didn't know you meant it that way life is just not like tv learn that every day and here we
are good evening you're on off look over time go ahead hello this is lou right you calling from
washington dc and you've never sounded better you sound really loud and uh i can hear you yeah
there's a little bit of a hum but so what yeah i think some of this is the compressor there's like
a gain boost on the back of the compressor and the button's kind of sticky so i can't tell if it's
rising or if it's the hum just tells you you're on the phone that way you know
yes well i just got here um let's see that's because yeah i got here i was late um it's 8 37 so i
have no idea what was said on off the hook or over time but you know i just had a thought you seem to
be having so many problems with your equipment such and such well we just fixed it we just fixed
it well what no no what were you going to suggest why don't we just do give up
i'd say i'd say give up the names of the equipment names and model numbers of the equipment you're
using because you know some people might know hey there's a trick for that here's how to make
this thing work with that such and such you know yeah he said give out not give up okay i give up
i know i hear you caller um we did talk about it a little bit uh basically what the connection is is
a return from the board that filters out the caller but sends our mics back um to them so there's
auxiliary outputs or auxiliary monitors so we have a quarter inch cable that goes in it's a stereo cable
it's only pressed halfway down in the uh auxiliary output and then that sends like three channels
from our board back to the caller yeah it's probably not correct but when i press it all the way down
we get nothing no hum but no nothing so there's something wrong like i think tip or ring is backwards
or it's just it's set up wrong to return audio to the caller that's what we've isolated it to
and then there's some other stuff it sort of reminds me of plugging stereo headphones into
like a mono tape recorder i knew it would vary depending on the specific aux cord the manufacturer
how far apart the rings were but if you just put in not and put it in not all the way just a little
bit you could get the mono channel on both the left and right but it only worked if you didn't put it
in all the way because normally when you plug a stereo headset into a mono audio jack you only get
it on the left because that's just how the physical uh jack connectors are laid out well right there's
that is actually technically right for um uh effects returns and it's labeled as such on the board i just
might be doing um that same thing with uh a monitor output that doesn't work that way but i it's cobbled
together and i'm not totally expert but that is a normal thing to do in certain instances but i may
be using the wrong type of plug to do that with it's not a mono plug so this is the best sounding
phone call we've had in months yeah it sounds happy about that so what's that what's on your mind what
what else is going on well i'm on the 2500 i did adjust some settings on the telephone
for different audio codecs so yeah i mean this is the best it will get better than a cell phone i
presume i haven't heard myself with these new settings yet but no but oh well we're also we're
also on the 2500 it's um it's weird you said you're on the 2500 dmg i'm also on the 2500 dmg
yeah it's a dmgc and it's got this weird r button do you have an r button that's for redial
redial i don't want to i don't want to press it because i don't know what number it might be but i
don't think it actually is for redial i think it was part of a different system but someone else
can correct what could r stand for other than redial it must be redial maybe yeah but it says
let's see it's got a date sold 1989 oh it's warranty expires in 1989 oh dear uh but that's not
when it was made it was made before that asset warning use for business systems only or you risk
an electrical short circuit wait what yeah that's what i mean like it's meant for like a it's an
extension from like a business like i want to say pbx or something but i don't know someone can
explain what these are used for i looked it up a long time ago but um where did we get that phone
someone gave it to us people always giving us phones people give us phones like nobody's business
yeah and don't stop anyway yeah well please keep them coming um but this is a good keyed phone and
uh how so how's your 2500 working how's your your new keypad yeah i demonstrated it uh last time the
buttons yeah some of the settings we're enjoying the music settings for dtmf recognition so let me see
if my fast dialing comes up on your side of the line okay okay let's go let's go
that was a little choppy but we got we got it we're hearing some clicks between the tones but
we are hearing the tones okay well that's all really good yeah every every week our technology
gets a little bit better keep it up though that sounds great it sounds like you really got a good
set up there may i ask where you got your 2500 uh it was i i said this on a previous call but it was
from a local house that was being cleaned out so this was installed originally by bell um oh yeah
this neighbor he was actually a ham radio operator i don't think i can uh say his call sign but yeah he
just kept all this old stuff yet he had a lot of interesting radio stuff and i got to keep a lot of it
um let's see he had a really early cell phone where actually it was three different there's like a
battery pack something to plug in the car etc it's all split up and black and it's neat i i take that
personally but also there was a uh in a shed it was a box um what's the manufacturer i forgot the
manufacturer what uh what it was but it was but if i remember correctly use this box sort of like
it was an early animal uh rs camera i'm not i don't understand exactly how it works there's a paper
online from nasa that explains because this company had actually got a contract to nasa they were selling
these devices to them it's an experimental system where like it's a camera set it's a image sensor and
somehow it translates that image into a two-dimensional black and white uh feel
in rs and rs can be modulated um manipulated so such and such to
what happened to him sounds like his internet dropped a little
oh that's my internet well you disappeared into an echo for a second but you're back you're back now
okay so do you need any further explanation it was just like a box um that was sold that was sold
under contract from this company to nasa and it's some sort of image sensor that translates uh what the
camera is seeing into an r field and the image can be manipulated and zoomed in electronically through
that r field and i have no idea how it works uh but i got it from the same guy i got that it's 2500 dmg
scrubs out good to hear it sounds fantastic it sounds like you um are the good home that this
equipment desperately needed and um that ham radio operators are great and good people and it's good
to make those connections and and uh be a place for some of this old equipment to go for for curious
types and people that might breathe new life into them with uh other tools and technologies that are
um that are ever present so great great to hear that
yes um well i didn't have any planned anything planned of course because i didn't listen to
off the hook or anything uh on overtime past 8 30 so well then you have off the hook to look
forward to because i think it's posted already on the internet oh okay well and just remember
a picture is worth a thousand words i don't have time to spew a thousand words here no well wait hold
on let me just plug this in real quick
oh did the hum just get louder i thought it did do you hear something well i hear the hum
okay hold on is he controlling the hum somehow
it's changing you hear that yeah yeah but we're also on a call
because it's full duplex it's going back and forth so you could have noise in his system somewhere
along the lines it's an imperfect system but look it's working yes we're communicating yes and
honestly that's all that matters it really communication can be messy oh that's some data
there we're also on a call wait why do i hear kyle on the phone full duplex it's come back and forth
kyle's in the past somewhere along the lines it kyle this is this is a manual from the future can
you hear me
and the first person who gets us that uh data uh translated will uh
win a prize is that a picture i think it might be a picture
a picture is worth a thousand words all right well we're gonna we're gonna let you on that for a
while very very cool thanks uh thanks so much for your call and for listening yeah keep listening
keep experimenting and they are out of here yeah they left before we even said that wow all right
that was that was good that was not bad any next thoughts from uh people in uh signal land
uh that sounded really good and i'm uh i'm glad we got uh glad we got such a good connection and
you know the hum is just a little a little friend in the in the air now rather than an enemy i think
yes but we were getting notification from the chat and i agree that that was the best sending call we've
had in a really long time um and it was on a landline to another landline so that's important to point out
so if if calls sound terrible in the future it might be because they're not landlines but that's
you know this is my opinion hopefully not too political but uh that's how i feel
well i think that's very fair it's really like below the threshold on the compressor
which we only integrated when people were complaining they couldn't hear
so i don't know like the compressor's not doing anything well i think we have time for one or two
more calls 802-321-4-225 country code one if you're outside the u.s uh 802-321-4-225
uh 802-321 hack is what that spells and uh anything on your mind as far as uh technology uh the world
um fun things you're doing um the hope conference coming up in august you know all sorts of things
we we closed our um our speaker submissions on monday and boy do we have a lot uh and we're going to be
uh posting those fairly soon and hopefully people will uh uh we'll look forward to that as much as we
are um also just for the record um and lou ratio this is well for everybody but just so you know
the archive is up on the wbai website uh if you want to listen to tonight's show and if you give us
a little time after we're done here tonight it'll be up on the 2600.com website 2600.com slash oth
and our podcast feeds and all these wonderful things but you know if you're really chomping at the bit
you can find our archive already this evening so just so's your nose yep
no no no call huh kyle uh yeah uh i what i'm being nice i i didn't say anything you know
uh i welcome the conversation um apologies for sounding frustrated there's well it's also like
94 degrees in this room so the air quality is bad yeah and we have smoke from the canadians thank you
very much uh so that's in the area um and sand sand from africa i believe but that's that's mostly in
the south but supposedly they're going to meet and have some kind of a a smoke sand storm so we have
that to look forward to later in the week um yeah so um all sorts of things going on
all right you know maybe nobody wants to call we'll give it two more minutes 802-321-4225
if we don't get a call in two minutes we're going to have an early night which you know we deserve
yeah i was excited that we got to hear the touchdowns from our caller this week and
and and heard his his fast finger dialing there
we appear to have a call and we're going to say good evening you're on off the hook overtime
good evening you're on off the hook overtime good evening how are you doing there is a large hum
yes we're aware of the hum but it's not it's not a crippling hum and you're you sound very loud
right i just wanted to let uh alex know from a couple weeks ago two three weeks ago um
that corpus is a neuter noun so it it was in the accusative uh this is the is that all helpful
habeas corpus yeah that makes a lot of sense then why the accusative form would be different
i i good is it um singular or plural accusative i think it would be singular right um i've forgotten
whether uh i've forgotten what the plural might be but it's certainly in the singular yeah yeah
also interesting choice for a um a neuter noun wouldn't you think right body meaning it doesn't
belong to any particular gender right you need to speak very loudly for me to be able to hear you
hmm i'm saying that neuter the neuter form for this this noun my is is kind of an interesting
choice for the word for body right is what we're talking about in latin the word for what are you
talking about corpus yes yeah yeah like so okay so that so we're talking about the word for body
right yeah okay good yeah but the fact that that's neutral and it's not masculine as or feminine right
you would think that in some kind of patriarchal society that would be a masculine noun but the fact
that it's a neuter noun or a neutral noun and it's the word for body i think this is kind of interesting
indicates some some measure of equality well there's not necessarily a rhyme or reason for what
for what a a particular word is in latin yes i think a uh a counter example to this is a another
a neutral noun a counter example to this in is in russian the word lagalisha is a neutral noun and
and that is the word for vagina i sent the police to you alex because i'm kind of sick of this
conversation and someone has to stop you good good we're talking about words a lot tonight gila was
talking about etymology earlier now we're talking about latin um latin to conscience and and the uh
accusative form
but but i agree why don't why don't we move on do you have anything else color i'm sorry for
annoying you with with this
not in the slightest we appreciate that
all right well there's a lot going on there actually the cops might have been on the way to
our to her house not yours because i don't hear them anymore unless they just arrived all right
uh 802-3214 oh there they are they're back 802-3214-225 we have time for uh another call good god
turning turning you guys down until uh things calm down uh gila you seem to want to say something but
you're coming in the same channel as noisy alex so unless he mutes um okay go ahead
no sorry i was just something going on here we're good
or the cops coming to your house is that what's going on
never tell wow i don't hear cops yeah
all right we have
we have another call i think hello uh i haven't greeted you yet um but uh yeah go ahead you are on
off the go time greetings hello i i would have called sooner i haven't listened in forever and it's
just inconceivable that i could get through i mean the last time i was listening that would have been
but anyways thank you thank you for being here um i i have a question for you about the upcoming hope
conference i've been to a couple hopes but i never um volunteered and i was thinking about it and i'm
truly i'm not a shill but i'm really interested in um what assignments i could get or how i could like
lean towards an assignment uh are you interested in anything in particular
um well i i live in new york so i have a lot of resources in terms of um you know knowing my
way around and stuff so i i could be an asset i just want to be an asset so i could be an asset to
people that are unfamiliar with the area but i i just would want to be useful actually absolutely
yeah no it sounds like uh there are many things you can do and being being local is is certainly
an advantage and i gotta tell you you know the only way these things succeed is through the the hard
work of volunteers and uh we really need volunteers this year because this is uh the first time we've
done it one year after doing a previous one and uh you know with with everything that's going on in
the world a lot of people are are just worn out uh so we need we need new people we need a lot of new
people for this to work if we're going to keep doing this so uh what i would suggest right now
is to email volunteers at hope.net uh and and let's get you uh on the radar so that uh we know how to
contact you and we can uh start um uh organizing and and and figuring out where you know you can you can
work best outstanding um i'm looking forward to it i've been to maybe the last four or five and uh
good time was had by all thank you all for uh making yourself accessible that's amazing to me
well thank you for the support we you know we couldn't do it without people like you
thanks peace out all right beware and uh yeah again the email address if you want to volunteer for
hope volunteers at hope.net and uh the website is just hope.net and you can see all kinds of updates
there we're we're adding uh talks and speakers uh we're processing so many so if if you don't see yours
there yet you might see it there in the in future days or weeks uh and you know that runs up to the um
when the conference begins because sometimes spots open up and talks that uh weren't accepted suddenly
get accepted so uh we never say no but uh we are open to so many different ideas and presentations
we have another phone call good evening you're on off the hook over time go ahead
hello i've got the answer to uh that uh picture thing that the gentleman played the audio you do wow
i'm impressed that was fast that is a that is a system which is used at amateur radio and other
radio systems as well called slow scan television okay what that is is sending tv pictures not fast motion
tv pictures that you're used to but one or two photographs at a time using very low bandwidth
signals like uh a single the bandwidth of a single sideband signal and uh that uh you can in about 30
seconds to a minute you can send a uh low res tv picture to someone via hf shortwave circuits or even
vhf uhf as well in other words it's for uh single video photographs that it's still used today in
amateur radio and other systems can you tell us how um how many like what the lines are of the raster like
is it 640 i am not sure that because i don't do slow scan television but i know what it sounds like
but the thing is you can get programs to decode that on the internet they're either shareware or
freeware or available for a minimal cost but there were software solutions to decode those programs okay
so to be clear you haven't actually decoded that picture yet no no no but it can be done well i want
to see somebody do it i really do well we suspect it as much someone will have to get a recording of
that uh that data dump if you will and just put it through the software decoder of uh that you'll
get a picture on the screen and you can find that at our website 2600.com off the hook you'll be able to
grab the uh the data there or on the youtube channel i think we uh we have everything stored
there as well so i i hope somebody's able to do that so okay also one other thing on your phone
problems let me just ask uh uh well maybe you know i'm sure kyle does what uh what type of jack do you
have on the uh the wire side of the uh of the interface is it a stereo or a mono jack
for the hybrid yes all right well one uses xlr like balanced inputs and the other is a portable
one like for like sports broadcasting made by gentner and it has a i'm using the quarter inch headset jack
uh and running that into a channel or actually is it a stereo or a mono jack that is a good question
uh the i don't know about the plug i'm gonna assume it's a stereo plug um uh stereo jack and
i think i have a stereo stereo plug on your board correct yes so yeah i'm using stereo connectors and
it's probably stereo for the headset go ahead okay uh so you can uh uh if if it is stereo there is a
way to do uh uh convert that to uh xlr connection because an xlr connection is called a balanced
connection and what you're trying to do is insert a consumer device onto that which is uh uh not uh
designed designed to match with it but there is a hack around it yes uh what you are describing
is um i forget what they're called but there are we're actually using some of those for the output to
the to another system when we broadcast for air and we had used that early on actually we were using
um software that was going through um software that was going through believe it or not the headset
jack on a smartphone and we had um the the the uh balanced basically it would lift the audio bring
it up with like a capacitor or something we're using those same connectors understand what you're
doing yeah what you might also we're not doing that inserting the also the other thing about inserting
the plug halfway into the uh into the into the other plug to get the the full audio you can get
an adapter uh a stereo to mono or monitor stereo i forgot off hand that you could put on the end of
that cable and then insert it all the way and you should not have problems that is probably a wise
solution um and i would suggest what you've done because i've seen uh i know what you're going
through because i've seen situations like that in the broadcast engineering contacts well i really
appreciate your empathy and um yes like it's it's really um a bunch of different things and that the
really difficult part is when i'm trying things to get rid of a hum without knowledge of actually
what i'm trying to fix i end up doing like five things at once and you don't really know and then
kind of literally break it down to uh a step-by-step procedure exactly also what you might have is a
ground loop issue where uh i assume that on that board there is a uh a ground connection where uh uh
you can literally connect that to ground bond that eliminate that could be another way to eliminate
the understood yeah the board is itself not bonded um it does have like a regular ac plug in it
and it it is itself uh a hand-me-down a very old board um but a pretty reliable one made by uh
mackie which is uh fantastic i'm familiar with the mackie stuff oh yeah fantastic washington company
i don't want to bore everybody else so but i figured i'd just throw that into the oh no we'll
we love talking about technical stuff i'm captivated by it it's it's it's fairly complex and
some of it i'm paraphrasing or or um you know being a little bit general um for various reasons uh
we don't want to be too specific about everything we're doing but uh the one hybrid we've used
before uh may work better we'll keep reconfiguring it but basically we've isolated it to the the path
that's coming back going to the collar um and it may be the wrong auxiliary monitor plug as you said we
could get an adapter we will uh we'll have some help i think because it's a little bit beyond my level
of expertise with audio engineering um like you said lifting signals that are not line level and
balanced inputs and stuff like that i can do things that you know work in my head because it but it's
not uh electrically uh correct and being correct yeah that's that's how i started so that's how i
started and you've got to start experimentally and do hands-on so you're doing exactly the same
thing that i did when i got started in the industry this is like i know what you're going
through yeah thank you thank you for that it's it's like audio wild crafting here and uh we're
pretty good at it we can make it you know work uh in a pinch but it's not necessarily correct but
we'll take uh your comments to heart like i said just trying to help out over here oh absolutely i
appreciate it appreciate the perspective and we'll keep working it as as frustrated as we sound but
you sound fantastic and um and uh please uh continue listening when you can and uh if you
have any other ideas or suggestions you're always welcome that's about it by the way emmanuel we did
meet uh years ago you probably won't remember me but it was it when you were a date in a couple years
uh had a chat with you and uh i'm not sure if kyle was there but uh uh among the things that we
talked about was uh radio albania back in the day and i did some bizarre imitations of their on-air
people and so on and you you kept asking me can i get an air check of that and i said no
radio tirana yes i i remember uh-huh wow so uh-oh
did somebody lose their internet again or oh darn that was a good call that was a really good call
we might get uh well they might still be connected maybe they muted themselves yeah we we don't hear
you caller anymore um it seems to still be connected yeah so maybe there's something if you can hear me
press press a touch tone or something actually yeah oh or do that all right that tells me that
you got disconnected so let's give me a chance to call back because i wanted to hear the end of that
conversation uh and um great suggestions though yeah and i really appreciate it i was trying to
remember that the date and conversation um yes rob go ahead uh while we're waiting for uh that call
back um just uh shout that uh 2600 meetings are happening this friday all over the world go to 2600.com
slash meetings and uh also a shout out to dr 47 over on mastodon who was able to pull out uh
most of the picture that was broadcast over uh sstv on this uh on on this session really um yeah it's uh
it's been uh boosted by the off of mastodon and you can see it's some sort of uh cartoon character
um not all the details are visible but it's very cool that that was sent over the audio of this youtube stream
wow okay i want to see that maybe uh maybe somebody can display it and uh we have a call back is this
the same caller hello can you hear me okay now this should be better we got cut off for some reason
yes something happened i'm glad you called back okay but uh what happened was that uh we got talking
about shortwave and uh back then and uh uh i was talking about radio tirana right back in the day with
the very stilted the way that their announcers handled things and uh you know this one woman who
was classically weird she would come on and do things like uh she sounded like she had no personality
at all and uh she would come out and talk about uh things like uh the the imperialist united states
would do this and this and that and the glorious albanian people run by dictator enver hoja are the
greatest people in the world wow and you were running dogs of american imperialism do not like this
and that's that's what she sounded like and that's what she said too things like that you got the names
right and everything yes definitely wow okay that's about it i i you know i i must remember that
conversation i probably told you of the time i went to canada and i called radio uh tirana from
canada because you weren't allowed no you didn't tell me that oh yeah tell me that you could not
call albania from the united states back then uh so i actually went when i was going to canada for
other reasons uh i in a hotel room i was able to place a call to radio tirana and i was able to
communicate to them my address and ask them to send me a qr code uh not qr code qsl card
uh and they did they did like a month later i got something in the mail from radio tirana it was
amazing uh that that is truly bizarre because that that was one of the strangest stalinist
cold war relic radio stations of the period well you'll be happy to know that um radio pionyang is
still on the air they still have interval signals you can hear them on shortwave and it's just like
nothing has changed oh yeah i'm aware of that wow may i ask where you're based i'm based in northern
new jersey cool well it was a pleasure talking and uh hopefully we we see you uh at hope or other
events in the future and uh hear from you on the phone as well okay take care have a good day all
right be well that was awesome that was awesome and that's gonna do it yes thank you kyle for for
making all that possible it's your hard work yeah good job yes my displeasure oh him applause and
everybody out online should be applauding right now no no no stand on on your front porches and
blow air horns and cheer because the engineers of the world are what get things done
yes um any final words from from folks here i do do a lot of engineering you do and and and
you hate it you hate engineering but he does it anyway
no final words anyone i had fun yeah it was fun yeah this this was cool thank you to everyone
out there for bearing with us while we uh figure shit out and but seriously everybody was sounding
great yes yeah we'll try to make it sound better for next time but i'm happy with this it'll get better
it's just a lot of a lot of equipment a lot of moving parts and older stuff and newer stuff and
yeah we probably need some converters and some we need an engineer actual audio engineer i think most
everyone maybe everyone on the uh who called in today was on a landline i you know i think it's
quite possible ham radio people i know they're right you're right yeah yeah
something to think about well you can write to us oth at 2600.com we'd love to hear from you uh
the praise criticism uh new information anything uh more info on hope hope.net uh please uh um
visit contribute be uh be a part of it we uh it's it's it's a lot of fun august uh 15th through 17th
i believe right in uh in queens at st john's university yes and the date in the middle is 16 16th
and it's hope 16th so you get you get that it's it's the middle of the conference okay no one
ever mentioned that before but you're right yeah the 16 is in the middle right in the middle
of those three days we named it hope 16 because it's the 16th conference yeah
that works too i implore people to communicate and don't give up
that's it oh no one said anything don't give up
yeah so that means communicate people i mean speak and say stuff please communicate because that's really
lagging and and i think people uh are forgetting the power of understanding and um and how easy it
is to reach out or to share what you're thinking and um one one-to-one communication or talking to
many people like you are here by calling in and broadcasting or sharing your thoughts over email
whatever it is do it don't don't restrain yourself and and don't forget you know your words matter
and people are listening people want to hear you um and they know you have something to say
and just above all in in all of this technically if you're taking on we know you're taking on
uh challenges if you're trying new things if you're um pushing yourself and and you're outside of
your comfort zone whatever you do just don't give up yeah go ahead rob and uh just uh shout out there
to wherever applicable whoever needs to hear it happy pride month uh remember stonewall was a riot
that's true we could use a a few more of those i think
all right well that's going to do it for us uh alex do you have something to your hand is
uh no i just want to say good night okay see you all next week yes bye