Art Bell

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June 12, 2004 - Art Bell

02:51:53

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dr. Lauren Weinstein - The Internet and Privacy

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01:08:31

dr lauren weinstein

01:08:56

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art bell ▲ ● ▼		Al-Qaeda is claiming a U.S. claiming an honest remember Al-Qaeda was warning U.S. citizens were going to be killed and that Saudi citizens and others should stay away from anybody while they're doing it.
		Suspected militants killed an American in the Saudi capital on Saturday, shooting him in the back grave, huh?
		As he parked at his home garage.
		And the U.S. Embassy said it was searching for an American who is listed as missing.
		A purported al-Qaeda statement posted on an Islamic website late Saturday did claim the terror group had killed one American, kidnapped another in Riyadh.
		It threatened to treat the captive U.S. rather treat their captive as U.S. troops treated Iraqi prisoners in Iraq.
		Senator John Edwards, the smooth-talking populist who emerged from the nominating campaign as John Kerry's chief rival, is now his chief favored, probable vice presidential running mate.
		You know, he had considered John McCain, and oh, that would have been quite a ticket, huh?
		I really like, oh, I have liked for a very long time John McCain, and that would have made a very interesting ticket.
		And polling showed, by the way, that McCain ticket with Kerry would have been about 15% ahead of the president or so.
		But it looks like next best choice is going to be Edwards.
		In the bloodiest fighting this year in Afghanistan, U.S. Marines killed more than 80 insurgents in a three-week offensive against a Taliban stronghold in the mountains of southern Afghanistan.
		U.S. military insisted the battle was a victory that will help secure fall elections rather than a sign of the resilience of Taliban-led militants.
		Toughening its stance in advance of a meeting of the UN Nuclear Watchdog Agency, Iran on Saturday said it would reject international restrictions, any of them at all, on its nuclear program and challenged the world to accept Iran as a member now of the nuclear club.
		There's something to think about a little bit.
		Iran as a full nuclear nation.
		The internationally built Cassini spacecraft completed a flyby of Saturn's largest outer moon as it prepared to enter a four-year orbit to study the ringed planets at NASA on Saturday.
		The plutonium-powered spacecraft, which is carrying 12 science instruments and a probe, came within about 1,285 miles of the dark moon on Friday.
		So we've got it out there.
		I wonder if any of you, and I know for a lot of you, this will have been a long time ago, saw the series Taken because I received a million emails saying, hey, Art, that was you in an RV at the end.
		Well, I never watched Taken.
		Instead, my wife and I obtained it on DVD and watched it commercial-free, all 20 hours of it, and finished just yesterday.
		And I must tell you, and if you think back, I'm sure you'll recall, that young lady, that Dakota Fanning, who played the little girl in Taken, was incredible.
		She was absolutely incredible.
		And she did the, of course, that was her voice, you know, doing the narration during the series as well.
		And she was so good that she was, I really don't have the right words to describe the way she played that part.
		It was surreal.
		That anybody that age, and she's, what, nine or so, I guess, when she did take it, it was just beyond all reason that there would be a young lady with that sort of ability to read and act and have on her face the exact correct expression at the correct moment.
		There was nothing no fake moments, no moments when you went, oh, come on, or any of the rest of it with respect to what she did in that series.
		It was absolutely amazing.
		So better late than never, but I did get C taken, which I thought was incredibly Spielberg's taken, which was incredibly well done.
		And Dakota Fanning, I don't even know what to say about her.
		Absolutely incredible.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've only seen two what you would regard as UFOs in my entire life.
		One, the very large black triangle, a story of which I've told many times.
		Second one, in both cases, my wife was with me, thank goodness.
		Second one was on this property, just simply looking up, watching a jet and the contrail Behind it, suddenly seeing a silvery object, a saucer, it was a saucer, in the contrail behind this airplane, which then moved above and finally took off like a bat out of hell to the western horizon.
		And we stood in my driveway and watched that.
		I received a bit of a video footage from Mark, Mark O. We'll call him, on May 14th.
		Well, actually, just a couple days ago, but it occurred May 14th in Sonora, California.
		It shows what he caught on camera, which I showed to Ramona, and she said, yep, that's what we saw.
		It didn't act exactly the same way.
		Ours more or less stayed within the contrail, moved aside from it a little bit, and then took off to the west and was gone.
		But what he's captured, what Mark has captured on video here is very, very reminiscent of exactly what we saw.
		Didn't act quite the same way physically.
		Other than that, certainly what we saw, it's a saucer, and it's good video footage, and it's on the website right now.
		So I invite you to go to coastam.com and play the video footage that Mark caught.
		Same thing we saw.
		Just about exactly the same thing.
		So that was the second sighting I've had in my life.
		Now, while you're up there at the website, you might also want to go by my webcam.
		In the upper left-hand corner of the website, you'll see Arts webcam.
		Click on that.
		This is from Chuck in Orlando, Florida, and it says, Hey, Art, the webcam photo you have up, an aerial view of your property, leads me to ask, are you building a small harp?
		Yeah, I guess I am, Chuck.
		This is sort of an interesting story, of course, and Chuck refers here to a photograph of my antenna, which is indeed up there right now, and of my property.
		And that antenna that you see covers five acres in total, five acres, and it is remarkable in every sense of the word, remarkable.
		I built this antenna, which was quite a very serious undertaking, after reading a book about W6AM.
		It was called W6AM Amateur Radio's Pioneer.
		And he built very large rhombic antennas and put two wires on them and claimed that it gave additional gain.
		That's a very long time ago, right after, well, virtually in years following SparkGap, you know, at the very beginning of radio.
		And he made some claims in his book that were remarkable about using two wires.
		And so I thought, why not apply the technology to a very large loop, which is what I did.
		And it has been most anomalous.
		I must tell you, we've been testing this antenna for some time now, and it does much more than I ever asked or imagined that it would.
		As you know, there are about now an excess of 300 anomalous volts, which I have carefully shunted to ground, which there are many theories about what it's doing there.
		It's been measured on a cloudless, stormless, windless, blue sky day.
		It's still there when there are power failures in the area, disabling the grid, so you would have imagined any coupling.
		It's still there because we had power failure, and I ran out and measured the voltage, and sure enough, there it was.
		So it's a fairly remarkable thing that I've built, it would seem.
		And I did take a photograph of it, had a good friend come over in a helicopter, and he took me up.
		And it's really the only way to capture the size.
		And as for the scale, as I just told you, it takes up about five acres of ground.
		And what it does is really, really incredible.
		And so it would seem that in the very early days of radio, those days following the old spark gap transmitters, they may have known a lot more than they know today in some ways.
		In other words, I'm suggesting there was technology developed that has been virtually forgotten with the advent of directional antennas and beams.
		A lot of these very large array antennas have been virtually forgotten.
		And so I must tell you that building something of this scale and magnitude has been illuminating, would be the right word, in a lot of ways.
		I've got an email here from I've got, of course, a lot of things I want to cover with you.
		From L. H. Davis asking me my opinion on the Burrish thing.
		And I refer, of course, to somebody called Dan Burrish, I believe it is, who was allegedly a microbiologist or something, a whistleblower, somebody who was going to tell all.
		And, you know, this thing went flying around the internet like there was no tomorrow.
		And so I did some investigation on my own, and it was kind of vapor.
		I guess there is a Mr. Burrish, and I guess Linda did talk to him.
		But somebody asked me a week or two ago what I thought of it from a credibility point of view, and my answer is not much.
		That's what I said then, and that's what I still think now after hearing what I heard last night on the radio.
		I still think there is nothing to it.
		But you never know, and I could certainly be wrong.
		I followed the trail as best I could, and I talked to a lot of people who used pseudonames on the Internet and frankly were kind of strange.
		The whole story just did not gel for me, and so I never went forward with it.
		Now, there may be something to it, and there may turn out to be something To it, but I don't know.
		I would join George, who I heard last night suggest Mr. Bursch be solicited to take a lie detector test.
		Now, this is interesting.
		This comes from the following comes from Whitley Streeber's unknowncountry.com A Bob White kept a secret for many years.
		He says, I'm a 73-year-old.
		I don't have much longer.
		This is the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life.
	He's showing the world an artifact he claims fell off a UFO in 1985.
	Steve Rock writes in the Kansas City Star that White keeps the artifact locked up in a small building that he calls the Museum of the Unexplained.
	White says, I've been called every name you can think of.
	What I'd like to see before I'm gone is the national media get their heads out of the sand.
	I'd like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real.
	Once it happens, White says, it's something you'll never forget.
	What I saw was not one of this earth.
	He didn't believe in the existence of UFOs before 1985.
	In fact, I was the biggest skeptic in the world, he said, but he and a friend were driving from Denver to Las Vegas on a lonely highway at about 2 or 3 a.m., White asleep in the passenger seat, when his friend woke him up and pointed to a strange light in the sky, which eventually became so bright that it almost blinded them.
	White got out of the car to look at it, says the object was only about 100 yards in front of him.
	It was huge, absolutely huge.
	That's a quote.
	Eventually, it zoomed quickly up into the sky where it merged with what looked like a cigar-shaped UFO, and then the larger ship disappeared.
	Now, as the craft flew away, White saw an orange light falling to the ground.
	It was red hot, but when it cooled, he picked it up and kept it secret for about ten years.
	I didn't want anybody to call me a UFO nut, said he.
	I was afraid it might hurt my career.
	The object is about seven and one-half inches long and shaped like a teardrop.
	It's metallic.
	It weighs less than two pounds.
	White had it tested and discovered it's made mostly of aluminum.
	He removes the object from the museum display and puts it in a gun case at the end of every day.
	It never spends the night at the same place any two nights in a row.
	In 1996, NIDS, you know NIDS, right?
	Sent a sample of it to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
	The analysis was pretty mundane, said a NIDS spokesperson.
	We didn't find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial, but we also couldn't identify it.
	White has twice now passed polygraph tests about the encounter and the artifact.
	Captain George Larby, who conducted the first polygraph test in 1990, says, I believe he found an object that fell from the sky.
	There was no reason for me to believe he was intentionally fabricating any aspect of this story.
	White says, I don't know what I've got to do to prove this is the truth.
	You can't make this stuff up.
	Well, you could, I guess.
	But I believe him.
	And you can imagine there are many people out there who probably have things that they could tell us.
	And they're probably approaching their golden years, and perhaps they would like to talk.
	Well, I would love to hear anybody, what anybody has to say on that score.
	And a lot of us who are now getting toward the end of our lives, the last, you know, the twilight years, I don't know what Frank Sinatra would say, the fall of it all.
	If you have something of that magnitude that has been a burden to you all your life, I can imagine you might want to get it off your chest.
	So by all means, if you have something like that, get hold of me.
	It's easy.
	Artbell at AOL.com or Art Bell at mindspring.com.
	Either one will work just fine.
	And this email, this last weekend, you mentioned that it was strange that in other countries, if people see UFOs, they report them to the military.
	And we don't do that here in the United States.
	I know why.
	Well, he's right.
	I did say that.
	In other countries, like South America, for example, a bunch of Europe, people will call the military if there's a UFO.
	Here in the U.S., no.
	And there is a good reason why.
	A Carlene writes, there's no number.
	So you'd have to guess which agency are they listed in your local phone book, which one of their many offices and so forth?
	Chances are you'd get a lower-level clerk, maybe an enlisted person who wouldn't know what to do with the phone call.
	Wasn't included in their training.
	So they'd leave a message for someone who'd probably think the whole thing was a joke.
	But we do have our local law enforcement that do get such calls.
	I think a lot of people used to call their local radio stations.
	But that's become a joke with all the mergers.
	I tried to call a local station about something big happening in the San Diego area.
	It just kept getting told the news department wasn't in.
	Or the phone line doesn't even get answered.
	So that's a pretty good point, isn't it?
	There's really nobody in the military that you can call.
	Really?
	No one.
	I have made or tried to make such calls in the past.
	And I had a little bit of luck, but not a lot.
	And generally, you don't get past the night duty officer or somebody like that.
	So we don't.
	In this country, civilians don't really communicate directly with their military, Do they?
	Anymore.
	There may have been a day in America where that was once routinely done, and if you had a question that would seem to bear on something the military might know about, you could call them.
	But a good point is made here.
	Who would you call now?
	There is no real office to report unidentified flying objects.
	Officially, there's not even anybody investigating them.
	As a matter of fact, all of that ended with Project Blue Book.
	If you believe that, I've got a river that you might want to consider purchasing.
	Of course, they're investigating, but there's no public admission of this, nor is there any agency that you can pick up a telephone and call.
	As you would with a crime, if you thought it was interstate, you'd call the FBI, right?
	A federal crime?
	Or a local crime?
	But where do you report a UFO?
	You can't.
	There is really nowhere.
	There's Peter Davenport, of course.
	The UFO reporting center, NIDS, perhaps.
	And that's fine.
	Thank goodness we've got at least that.
	But none of it is even remotely official, even though NIDS, of course, has people that can go out and investigate such claims when they are backed up by something physical, for example.
	That certainly tempts them.
	But nobody in the military, you can't pick up the phone and say, would you give me the military's UFO investigation number, please?
	They're not going to give you that number because there is no such thing.
	All right.
	We're going to do open lines in the half hour coming up.
	So you're going to want to listen very carefully for the numbers coming up.
	They are a little different on the weekend.
	Open lines means anything at all you want to talk about, whatever it may be.
	We're that close, and it's coming up.
unidentified		We're that close.
		Be it silent, sand, smell, or touch, the something inside that we need so much.
		The sight of a touch or the scent of a sand, or the strength of an oak when roots deep in the ground.
		The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
		Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
		To lie in the meadow and hear the grass sing, to have all these things in our memories hoar and the useless warmth of the city.
		Right past your soul, take this place On this trip, just go me Run, take a free roll Take my place, have my seat It's for free Want to take a ride?
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
		From west to the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was just sitting here watching this video of myself from Mark, the one with the disc in the tail of the jet, the contrail.
		And I was thinking, how strange that we've reached a point in this country where a talk show host, me in this case, can sit here presenting you with a video of this, and it's almost mundane.
		I mean, this is a flying saucer.
		It's in the contrail of a commercial aircraft, and it's doing things and making movements that no aircraft could make.
		And it's almost, well, not quite, but almost mundane that I show you this video.
		And there's no number in the military to call.
		They don't investigate things like this.
		Come on.
		This is a silvery disk flying in the sky, no doubt with a radar cross-section behind an aircraft captured on videotape.
		I saw one just like it.
		And our military doesn't look at stuff like that.
		There's no number you can call.
		Our military doesn't investigate those things anymore.
		Come on.
		Give me a break.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		Good evening.
		As promised.
		Let us dip into the gene poll.
		That means do open lines.
		And first time caller line, you would appear to be first.
		Good evening.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hello, Mr. Bell.
unidentified		Do the wild thing at 775-727-1295.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, as you know, I don't let you use last names on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So that was a good one.
unidentified		That was a moniker.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
		Well, give me the first name of your moniker.
		Kenny D. All right, Kenny D. From the Fantastic Forum.
		All right, so what's up?
unidentified		Well, recently, well, I shouldn't say recently, like, for probably about a year or so, I've been contemplating whether ascension's possible for humans.
unidentified		Ascension?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ascension.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean that all humans would rise to a new level?
unidentified		The ability for an actual human being to ascend above matter into a world of pure energy?
		Something like that.
		Pure divinity, I'd like to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, watching the news and the world, that may happen, but it doesn't look rather, it doesn't look imminent.
unidentified		But the thing is, or at least from what I've gathered, is that, like, I don't think everyone's ready for that.
unidentified		I know I've already experienced, like...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think that was the point I was making.
unidentified		Well, something looks imminent, but I don't think it's going to be pretty what's imminent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would tend to agree with you, and I don't think that graduation is just around the corner, so to speak, for the human race.
		It wouldn't appear as though we're there yet.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Good morning, Arch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, this is Matthew Security Guard from Tampa.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		First off, great bumper music.
		It answers the age-old question of what did Howard Dean do before he went into politics?
		But I've got two things.
		First off, comment on Dan Burrish.
		I think until we get the polygraph tests, like two or three of them, and they've been independently confirmed, we've got to take this with a whole lot of salt simply because of the fact that he is alive and he's telling this story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I do.
		I take it with a great deal of salt, grains and grains.
		In fact, piles and piles of salt.
unidentified		Big old salt liquor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it could be a whole salt liquid.
unidentified		And the other one, I called you a couple of weeks ago and told you about this great big fire we had in Tampa that nobody was talking about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		We made them blink.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean?
unidentified		I mean, let's see.
unidentified		That call went over the air here about 20 minutes till 5.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It suddenly got a lot of attention.
unidentified		6 o'clock, there was a story about it on our local station saying that it had started in an abandoned railroad car.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The media is strange, isn't it?
unidentified		Yeah, especially the one that came out like 13 hours after it started.
unidentified		Have a good one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You too, sir.
		Take care.
		Yes, very strange.
		The media is strange.
		And the way it behaves is strange to observe.
		It's been reduced in the U.S. There was a day when just about everybody did their own independent investigation one way or the other.
		Or at least there were different sources now.
		In the modern day, what's happened is, and it's fascinating, stories are generated at the very top somewhere, and they flow downward.
		And all the affiliates, the radio stations, they all rip and read.
		They take the latest five-minute newscast, or even the networks are doing virtually the same thing.
		Some of them have reporters in the field, but most of the information is second-hand.
		You know, it's coming in the written word, teletype, and or the modern equivalent of it.
		And everybody's hooked up, and everybody's reading the same thing.
		So it is kind of interesting, isn't it?
		International line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, sir.
unidentified		You just talked about the media, and that's something that I find very interesting.
		So do I. I wonder if we're getting the truth at all.
		I'm originally from New Mexico, the state of New Mexico.
		And if you recall in the 2000 election, Gore won New Mexico by 396 votes.
		Well, there were some accusations that at the very last moment, 600 votes appeared out of thin air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do recall it was hotly contested in New Mexico, yes.
unidentified		And people have continued to work on it.
		And there was a CPA.
		I can give you her name if you want.
		If you'd rather not, I won't say that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, not here.
unidentified		Okay, there's a CPA in New Mexico who continued to work on it.
		And she found thousands of votes, thousands of votes on the Democratic side that they just couldn't account for from dead people, things like that.
		Really?
		This is well known in the state.
		In Las Cruces, a local talk show host has been bringing this up over and over and going, hey, look, Bush won New Mexico.
		That means the whole Florida thing is an issue, and it's uncontested.
		He is the President of the United States.
		You know, the Democrats have been throwing well.
		He hasn't been.
		And yet, no one wants to pick it up.
		I called this talk show host, and I talked to him for quite a while, and he goes, I don't get it.
		He says, we have real solid evidence.
		CBS, NBC, ABC, no one wants to pick this up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why do you imagine that to be true?
unidentified		Maybe because studies have showed that the major media is like 70 to 80 percent liberal, Democratic.
unidentified		I had a friend who worked for LA Times, and he said as a conservative, he was afraid to admit to anyone he was voting for Bush versus Gore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I can relate to that.
		I think that's right.
		The media is pretty much, by a gigantic margin, leftist, in my opinion.
		There's no question about it.
		But to imagine that they would ignore and not do a story of that magnitude, that's a little hard to believe.
unidentified		Well, I can tell you about two weeks ago I heard a story on the news, just one story where the Republicans were coming out and going, they basically said the Republicans have contended they have proof that George Buss clearly won the state of New Mexico.
		Heard one story and they never heard anything again.
		I don't know.
		It just makes me wonder if we're getting any truth at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wonder about that a lot, my friend.
		I don't know about any truth at all.
		There's always, in the very best lies, the best lies have a nugget of truth, a part of some truth to them.
		That's what makes them good lies.
		The fact they have a center nugget of truth.
		And then they expand and insert disinformation from that point on.
		But if you look far enough back, there's a gem of truth to it.
		And that's basically what makes a good lie a lie.
		West of the Rockies, you're on air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Sounds like Deebold strikes again.
unidentified		Art, first a comment and then a comment then about Dan Burrish.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		You were looking for a frequency around 1,420 megahertz.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And early on, astronomers were concerned that I needed to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me, if you don't mind, clarify that.
		We had received a signal that some number of us were hearing on 1,420 megahertz, which is a hydrogen frequency.
		And that got a little stir going at SETI.
		And that's what you're referring to.
unidentified		Yes, and early on, astronomers were concerned that the iridium satellite, which has frequencies near that in L-band, might have intermodulation products that could interfere with this frequency.
unidentified		So that's something you might look at.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could be.
		Anything could be.
		It's just that it was there.
		It was being heard here and as far away as Canada, which without, you know, I mean, it was there most of the night.
		Iridium satellites are moving.
unidentified		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so if it was moving at that rate, you would expect all kinds of things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For one, you would expect it to disappear, and you would expect to hear certain properties to a signal traveling at that speed.
unidentified		Stoppler.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Stopler affects.
unidentified		This Mr. Dan Burrish affair, this whole idea of a secret PhD doesn't pass the smell test.
		People do secret work at universities, and the report, the work product, may be classified, but the DOD can't classify anything that doesn't belong to them.
		And besides, it would be very impractical because if you or I got a PhD that nobody else knew about, we'd be indentured to the DOD, and we could never move anyplace else because no one would recognize our credentials.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What surprised me more than anything else was that Linda Moulton Howe gave it that much credibility, frankly.
unidentified		Yeah, I would be very careful about that one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very surprised that she would jump on that the way she did, but she did.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take care.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Does that mean you are?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be you, sir.
unidentified		Can I give my initials?
unidentified		MJC?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, not the JC, though.
unidentified		No, not the JC.
unidentified		MJC.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Couldn't have been.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your voice doesn't sound anything like his.
unidentified		Codename Spider-Man.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Code name Spider-Man?
unidentified		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Can I make a couple of comments and say something about President Reagan?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
unidentified		Yeah, it's apparently the government's not listening to your program because if they were, they might be trying to take you off the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they'd have to answer questions if they did that, wouldn't they?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where has Art gone?
unidentified		Hey, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Have you ever actually had an official on air?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have I had an official on air?
unidentified		Yeah, like a government-type official.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my guess is I've probably had many.
unidentified		Let me ask you something.
unidentified		Let me say something about the passing away of Ronald Reagan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Did you know back in the day the church thought he was the Antichrist?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Who did?
unidentified		The church?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't recall any such statement from the church.
unidentified		Yeah, because of his name, Ronald Austin Reagan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		6666, yes, exactly.
		But I don't think that was an official position of the church.
		That was the inevitable workings of a religious mind that dug that one up.
		Anytime you see anything like that.
		Six, Ronald, Wilson, Reagan, six, six, and six.
		And I remember that going around on the internet.
		And then as now, I give it about as much credibility as I do the whole Burrish thing.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Yeah, Dallas, Texas here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Yeah, years ago, a couple years ago, when I started listening to you, Mr. Bell, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		There was a lady that called in, and she had mentioned that she worked in Canada at a gas station, and supposedly a time traveler came to visit her.
unidentified		Do you recall that?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Vaguely.
unidentified		And she said she had a videotape of it.
unidentified		She was going to send it to you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I remember that now.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Did anything ever come of that, or was she just a kook?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I never received any such tape.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That doesn't automatically make her a kook.
unidentified		Right.
		Well, I'm fascinated with time travel.
		Any movies, any stories about time travel.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That reminds two of us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm right there with you.
unidentified		And the other thing I wanted to say, too, is something that always crosses my mind is how far can we go before we have to go back to the beginning?
		Like athletes.
		They're running so much faster now.
		They're running, you know, and they keep setting records.
		They keep setting records.
		100 years from now, are they going to be running 65 miles an hour?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There must be the equivalent of the wall in processing speeds for athletes running, but you never know.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		Okay, well, carry on, brother.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you very much.
		Take care.
		You know, processor speeds will hit this great wall, they claim.
		And I would think runners would be facing a similar wall.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
		Going once, going twice, gone.
		East of the Rockies, you would have been on the air.
		West of the Rockies, you are on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, you're not.
		First time caller line, you're on the air.
		Hi.
unidentified		Yes, this is Mark in Dayton, Ohio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Mark.
unidentified		Just south of Dayton.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Mark, turn your radio off, please.
		Yeah.
		We'll wait all the way off.
unidentified		Yeah, it's all.
		Good.
		Yeah, I just have a question for Art.
		That's me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm Art, sir.
		We don't screen.
		I'm sorry.
		You see, I don't screen calls.
unidentified		Yeah, I was assuming I was talking to a screener, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't have one.
unidentified		Yeah, it's a pleasure to talk to you, Art.
		And to you.
		My mother has been listening to you and George Norrie for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And she loves you guys.
		And unfortunately, I've just caught up with you in the last five or six months or so.
		But I wanted to ask your opinion about BPL.
		If you think that that's part and parcel of this shadow government, if that's an extension or a cousin, I call it, of HAARP, the so-called Skybuster AKA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're all over the place here.
		Hold on.
		One thing at a time.
		What do I think of BPL?
		I think it is a disaster and that it will screw up the shortwave bans all across the entire country.
		Do I think it has anything to do with the new world order or the shadow government or whatever?
		No, not necessarily.
		I think this has to do with a bunch of people who see an easy, fast way to make money.
		That's all.
		There are existing power lines, and if they can carry the Internet over these power lines into every single home where every single wall socket will have the Internet integrated with the electrical service, I think there are many reasons that we should be examining this and looking very carefully before we proceed, as the Federal Communications Commission now is inclined to do, blindly, I might add, just proceed.
		There are privacy issues to be addressed.
		There are interference issues to be addressed.
		There's a lot of things that need to be done, and ruining the ability of Americans to get shortwave on a 24-7 basis is insane.
		So until we know that it will not produce so much interference as to render all the HF frequencies useless, we should not proceed at all.
		But they are.
		And what do I think is behind it?
		I think money is behind it.
		People who want lots and lots of money.
		However, let me say one more time.
		With regard to this whole secret shadow government, I don't know.
		There may be dark forces that work behind the scene.
		I'm not so foolish that I would say that doesn't occur, because it does, because people are secretive.
		People do make deals with each other, and all kinds of things go on, but I just don't buy into all of this ridiculous, asinine, that's what I said, asinine, propensity of late for some people to be suggesting that the United States destroyed its own buildings in New York,
		destroyed a portion of the Pentagon with airplanes, that the United States was in any way whatsoever complicit with those who knocked down those buildings and killed so many Americans.
		I think it's reprehensible that these kinds of things are spread around without any proof.
		Oh, I know.
		You can always say, well, then, you know, I didn't see the right wreckage here or there, or jets could have gotten there, or whatever it is people are saying.
		But they're making these horrendous allegations without a shred, not a shred of proof.
		And that bothers me because this is my country, too.
		You know?
		And I just don't happen to believe that our elected officials would choose to kill by thousands their own citizens.
		I may believe a lot of things, but that's not one of them.
unidentified		I may believe a lot of things, but that's not one of them.
		Can you hear my heartbeat in this corner?
		You can run, but...
		music
		music
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right, everybody, we're about to talk about privacy.
		I don't know how much of it there really is left.
		I guess that's what we're going to find out tonight from Lauren Weinstein.
		As one of the old men of the internet, Lauren has been involved with the development of the net now for decades.
		He began his involvement in the early 70s at the first site of the Internet's ancestor, the Defense Department.
		It's called ARPLANT.
		Or is that A-R-P-A-N-E-T-R-Panet?
		He created and moderates the Privacy Forum, which was founded more than 12 years ago, and co-founded PFIR People for Internet Responsibility.
		I guess I'll have to explain that laugh.
		People for Internet Responsibility.
		There's not a lot of responsibility on the Internet, frankly.
		Lauren is an expert regarding a wide range of privacy issues and many other topics related to technology's impact on individuals and society.
		He writes and speaks about these issues in a broad variety of published and broadcast venues, and he'll be right here.
		Well, all right, so here is Lauren Weinstein.
		Lauren, welcome to the program.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, hi, Art.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's great to join you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good to have you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, by the way?
unidentified		I am in L.A. You're in L.A. Okay, good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I laughed at that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People for Internet responsibility, I'm not laughing, of course, at those people because that's what they want, but the level of irresponsibility being exhibited now on the Internet is astounding, Lauren.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You ain't just whistling Dixie.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		That's a technical explanation.
		It's a terrible situation, and there's blame to spread around everywhere.
		A lot of it's historical.
		The network that we see today wasn't really designed for the things it's being used for today.
		And that fundamental underlying fact affects a lot that we see in a lot of the problems that we have now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My understanding of the origin of the Internet was that it was created by scientists basically to be able to communicate or to have a communications network that was so much like a spider web that you literally couldn't knock it out, for example, in a nuclear conflict or something of that scale, that there would be this interwoven communications capability that would be so widespread with so many points that you simply couldn't knock it out.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that in fact was one of the key issues behind the driving of the original network, which was the ARPANET, that was brought from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is a division of the Department of Defense.
		The same ARPA, in fact, that was behind the Total Information Awareness Project, which was very controversial recently.
		Basically, what they have done all these years, all these decades, is invest in speculative technology, things that may not pay off, they may pay off, maybe they'll go nowhere, maybe they'll invent a super weapon.
		The ARPANET was in that category of systems to allow government entities, researchers, other people that had to be able to communicate to continue doing so, even if there was a nuclear war in theory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I guess to that degree, certainly they may have done it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the Internet is that, isn't it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		In some respects, it's almost been too successful because I think what we've got now is a system where spam will continue even in the event of a nuclear war.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Spam and roaches, I think, is what we'll have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Spam and cockroaches.
		Yes, you're probably right.
		If somehow, after a nuclear conflict, you managed to get a computer up and running and connected to some kind of Internet, there'd probably be something that would come through and say, we've got this pill.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		An extra three inches, even though the air is radioactive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		That's what's going to happen.
		We're laughing about it, and in a way, it's the only way to deal with it.
		But the really sad thing is that those kinds of messages and these kinds of problems are literally bringing the Internet down.
		I mean, the percentage of traffic now on the net, and this costs us all because we all have to pay for the infrastructure for all of this, is just astounding.
		And unless it's dealt with through major changes fairly soon, there's just not going to be anything left.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that sounds rather apocalyptic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
		I mean, what's happened now is that more than half the email on the net is spam, and it's rising rapidly.
		Much of that is coming from zombie computers, which have been taken over by spammers.
		People have PCs sitting at home on cable modems or on DSL lines.
		They don't even realize that they've got viruses in these things that are sending out spam.
		They're part of the problem now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm curious about something, and maybe you could answer this for me.
		After looking at a million of those, and I've had a resident email address, for example, artbell at mindspring.com.
		I've had that for, I don't know, 10 or 12 years or something.
		So being a very old and very public email address, I get spam.
		Well, for example, I get, at the very minimum, 6 to 12 opportunities to make millions of dollars from a dead relative in, I don't know, Nigeria.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Nigeria.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Per day, at least between 6 and 12 of those per day.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Those are the 419 scams.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		That's what those are called.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		My uncle has died.
		He has left $31 million in such and such a bank.
		And your last name also happens to be Bell.
		This one was a very creative one.
		It actually used my name.
		It picked my last name out, I guess, and assigned it so that it was specifically targeted spam, which is a little higher quality than the normal.
		But they actually used my last name.
		Some poor guy named Bell had died in Nigeria, leaving however many millions, and I was the only living relative.
		So that was a particularly creative one.
		But what I've wondered, Lauren, is whether these companies that sell the pills or any of the rest of this baloney that comes through actually makes anybody any money?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Evidence suggests.
		Well, first of all, you have to realize that there are different Categories of spam.
		A lot of spam exists only to sell systems for sending spam.
		So it's the snake eating its own tail.
		There's no real product there.
		So there's a certain category of those messages where there's really no product.
		It all exists for just to sell people software, to do other spamming.
		A lot of things going on are what are called phishing now, where people try to get you to put in your credit card number, or they claim your PayPal account has expired.
		Please put your account data in here again.
		There's those kinds of frauds.
		Then there are the things where the product actually exists.
		I mean, there's actually a pill, which probably, as we know, does nothing.
		There's people selling illegal cable filters, things like that, that also tend to do nothing.
		Do people get rich on it?
		Yeah, there seem to be a few top-level people who become very, very wealthy at this.
		These are the ones that we hear about occasionally being arrested and being sued for $50 million and all these kinds of things.
		At the lower levels, it's not clear that people really make money.
		But that's sort of usually.
		It's basically a pyramid scheme when you come down to it.
		And the pyramid's so broad at the bottom that all of us are inundated with the results.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But there are occasionally people at the top of the various pyramids who do get immensely rich.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it happens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, all this has to be happening for some monetary reason.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Always follow the money, right?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I mean, the attitude that the people take is that even if a fraction of 1% of recipients will bite on these things, if you send out enough of them and you saturate the universe with them enough, just that little percentage is going to add up.
		And that's where the money comes from.
		Now, the 419 scams, the Nigeria stuff you were talking about, that's kind of interesting because unlike most spams you see, most of the 419s have actual live human beings behind them.
		Those aren't generally automated.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why Nigeria, for example, out of all the places it could be coming from that would be more likely accepted by somebody, why Nigeria?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It seems to have developed there as a cottage industry.
		There's a lot of people doing it for their livelihood.
		The term 419 comes from the section of the Nigerian Penal Code that deals with this kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you mean they have a law against it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is illegal, and they do try to act on it, but these people move around very rapidly.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And in fact, there are people out there on the network who have made a career out of responding to these things and playing along with them and trying to activate it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've done that a couple times.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not to catch them, just because I wanted to see what the rest of the scam looked like.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and what tends to happen is that they'll say, well, to do this, you have to supply some money to do this or that.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And little by little, money, it's $1,000 here and $5,000 here and $10,000 there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many stories are there of poor little old ladies who, I guess, have fallen for this and really lost a lot of money?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, are there a lot?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there are people who've lost a lot of money, and there are people who have lost their lives through these things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Who have gone to meet.
		In some of these scams, they have to meet the people.
		Really?
		And people have actually died in the process of doing that when things went wrong.
		So it's not a funny kind of thing at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
		I didn't realize it had gone that far.
		That's remarkable.
		I've also, by the way, won a lot of lotteries.
		You have no idea how many lotteries I've won.
		Just amazing.
		And I can claim my prize, and it gives like a 19-digit number, which was my winning number.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The amazing thing is how many people got that same 19-digit winning number.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Anyway, so this is the dark side.
		And then there's even a darker side, personally, for example, of the Internet.
		I'm going to tell you a little story.
		Somebody, I mean, you can be a dog on the Internet is the old phrase.
		Well, I've had a couple dogs go after me.
		Somebody wrote several years ago, Lauren, they wrote an article, ostensibly by me.
		My name was assigned to this article, which trashed the Filipino race.
		I mean, it was a racist piece of garbage.
		It was horrible.
		And it was sent from the campus of UCSD, which, by the way, apologized for the fact that it came from their campus.
		And it was sent round the world.
		Well, I got all these threatening things.
		How dare you threaten my race?
		I mean, my God, my own wife is Filipino.
		Part Filipino anyway, half Filipino.
		But nevertheless, it didn't make any difference.
		In fact, you have no idea how bad it got.
		For example, it was picked up and published by a newspaper in Manila, in the Philippines, who decided to publish it without ever having called me to find out if it might be real or false, without doing any investigation whatsoever.
		They had to print a retraction.
		I think it ran, damn thing ran for about six or seven weeks.
		And of course, I threatened to sue them and all kinds of things.
		But they picked it up off the internet, giving it reality by printing it in the largest newspaper in Manila.
		And every now and then, about every year or two, this thing then goes around again.
		But this was done as an act of, well, I don't know, some sort of vengeance against me for some God knows what reason, but it was done, and I've had to answer those things for years now.
		And no matter how many times you say it ain't so, it goes around, around the world on the Internet, Lauren.
		Nothing stops it.
		And so there you have it.
		One act by one person faking something, and away you go.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I remember seeing that story when it first broke in the news about the whole controversy about the original fake story and all the reactions to it.
		And I remember talking to some of my colleagues about that because it was a real good example of how these things can get out of hand.
		I think that fundamentally what happens in these situations is you have, to a large extent, lazy news organizations as part of it who prints.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's lazy, all right.
		I mean, you pick up a story off the Internet, which is not no attribution at all, and you just print it.
		It doesn't get any more irresponsible than that.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, it's laziness.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people have forgotten about fact-checking.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And because it's so easy, I mean, the message is, hey, this is great.
		This is a great copy.
		This is a headline.
		Let's get it out there now.
		Quick, quick, quick.
		News cycle, news cycle.
		And then people get burned, as you did.
		And there's no real solution to it other than education.
		There's no technical solution to this one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's why I chuckled when I read Internet Responsibility.
		And I'm wondering, Lauren, how do we ultimately get any sort of Internet responsibility?
		How do people who write things be held accountable for them?
		In what way could we assign numbers or IDs or something to when people initiate an email or do a posting or something?
		Or do you, on the other hand, say, no, freedom of speech.
		And you can't control people that way and have them ID.
		They have every right to get on there and irresponsibly ruin somebody's reputation or whatever.
		I mean, how do you weigh in on this, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You've hit what is probably one of the top three issues on the Internet today, and I'm constantly caught in the middle on this one because of competing interests on both sides.
		What you're talking about is what we call largely authentication and identification, which is trying to decide to what extent email and other postings on the Internet should or can be tracked to a given individual and what the implications of that are for free speech,
		for anonymous speech, whistleblowers, political speech, other kinds of protected speech, versus on the other side, people who want to commit fraud, libel, things like that.
		A very, very complicated area.
		And at this point, what makes it even worse is that the legal structure that we're dealing with, I mean, let's not even worry about the technology for a moment.
		The technology of doing this is hard enough and is a big, big problem right now that's being worked on.
		I have a project now under PFER, which is called Tripoli, which is aimed at dealing with some of this.
		And it's going to take years to implement it if it's accepted.
		But the legal system is the other part of this, because you have a patchwork of laws at the state level, at the federal level, and then the Internet, of course, is international.
		So you have different countries with different domestic laws, many of which are in conflict in all of these issues.
		So even if you have a way of saying, well, I'm going to deal with this a certain way in countries A, B, and C, you have the other countries that do it differently, and mail could just as easily be relaying through those.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very good point.
		In the case, a case in point, in this story about this Filipino fraud letter, I mean, somebody just walked into a computer at UCSD at a library and sent this.
		Now, it was able to be tracked back to the library's computers, but it could have been anybody sitting there.
		Right?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So there's just not any accountability.
		If you do it in the U.S. Mails, there's some sort of accountability.
		But doing it on the Internet, there is no accountability.
		Presently, we have no accountability whatsoever.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, keep in mind that in the U.S. Mail case, though, you are not required to put a return address on a plain envelope.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Quite right, but there will be a stamp, at least indicating from where it was sent.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		At least in terms of the city.
		It's very difficult because you do have these competing interests.
		I mean, it's possible to postulate a highly controlled Internet where you couldn't touch it without some form of authentication.
		That isn't to say, however, that there wouldn't be ways around that because authentication is only as good as the underlying ID mechanisms.
		And as you know, there's tremendous fraud in IDs and driver's licenses, social security, all that stuff.
		So just having authentication at the Internet level doesn't deal with it.
		But if you take this to its logical conclusion in terms of really plugging up all the holes, it's pretty hard to do that without creating what amounts to a police state.
		So the Balancing Act is very, very delicate, and I don't think any of us really know how to do that balance correctly yet.
		And this is just one of the ongoing issues of the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have laws caught up with the fact of the Internet yet?
unidentified		No.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		No.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		We basically still have a 19th century view of a lot of this stuff, and now we're in the 21st century, so we're falling further and further.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		However, there are places on the Internet where you can virtually publish something, right?
		You can virtually publish something.
		So have slander and libel laws, for example, caught up with the Internet?
		Does somebody have to be...
		Are they then legally responsible for that slander as they would be if it were a published story in a newspaper?
		Hold the answer to that question, Lauren.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		It's 2 a.m.
		Here it is all.
		It's 2 a.m.
		It's us to a wall.
		It's a little warm.
		It's better taking a chance.
		Yeah, the storm won't lose.
		Sirenes in my head.
		As I'm silent, these are circuits to tend.
		It's better to go.
		My whole life spins into a brain.
		Oh, the night is my world.
		City lights, painted good.
		In the day, nothing matters.
		It's the night, time matters.
		In the night, no control.
		Through the wall, something's breaking.
		Wearing white, as you're walking.
		Down the street, a bustle move.
		You take myself, you take myself, I'm broke To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From West to the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country spread access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be me, all right.
		Good morning, everybody.
		I'm Mark Bellin.
		This is Coach Jose, and we're talking about a fact of modern life, and that is the internet.
		And I know so far it sounds like I'm kind of down on it, but actually the exact opposite is true.
		And so we'll get to that part of it.
		But I do want to know about internet and responsibility.
		We'll ask more about that in just a moment.
		Music Lauren Weinstein is my guest, and he's got a website, of course, at www.vortex.com.
		That's V-O-R-T-E-X.com, where you can learn a whole lot more about what we're discussing.
		Lauren, the question was with regard to civil laws and the Internet, can somebody go and publish an article about somebody else, clearly slanderous or whatever, in a newsgroup read by many, many people, which is the rough equivalent of publishing, and will that person or not be held responsible for what they write if it's liable?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The unfortunate answer is it depends.
		Because we were talking about that mishmash of domestic laws and international law, there were treaties that are involved in some of these issues also.
		It becomes a situation that is very case by case, depending on the country, depending on the person, depending on the courts, all these kinds of things.
		So it's hard to know.
		Now, you mentioned earlier how do you even figure out who really did these things in a lot of cases?
		And I want to give you an example of something that's going on right now.
		There's a big controversy over the data that controls who owns domains.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You have a domain like coasttocoastam.com.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And there's a system called WhoIs that keeps track of that.
		That's putting it in its basic form.
		There have been moves to basically mask a lot of that data.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Make it harder to find out who owns a domain, where their address is, their phone number, things like that.
		And the reason this has happened is because a lot of that information has been abused.
		Spammers have gotten hold of it.
		Stalkers have gotten hold of it in some cases.
		As ordinary people have gotten domains, not just big companies, they've been putting their home addresses into these things because there's required to be accurate data.
		So there's a lot of controversy.
		And of course, there are people on the other side of this.
		Think of the RIAA, for example, who want to stop file traders of music, who want to be able to track down very quickly who's doing what.
		So at this very moment, there are actually comments being received by the controlling organizations, or at least the influencing organizations, because no one really controls the Internet, as to how this is going to be handled.
		Now, this is all happening below the radar for most people using the Net, but the impact on the sorts of things you're talking about could be vast, affecting real lives.
		So these kinds of decisions aren't out there in the public where most people even know that they're being thought about, which is an unfortunate situation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, having said all these negative things about the Internet, and there are more to be said, I should add, I've been a very, very, very early user of the Internet, and I, very early on, recognized its relevance, for example, to the radio program that I'm doing.
		If I have a guest on, even before the Internet came along, I had a bulletin board service in which listeners could dial in and get information on the night's guest or leave messages or what have you.
		It was very early use.
		And then when the Internet came along, I was one of the, I think, the first actually to stream video.
		For example, I would sit here and just let a camera watch me while I did the entire program.
		And I don't know.
		I did that for a couple of years and then invented the Fast Blast that we now use on this program.
		And I've had a sort of interactive relationship between the radio program and the Internet now for years.
		And it has been wondrous.
		I mean, it is absolutely wonderful.
		Beyond that, Lauren, I own, I think, 15 computers.
		I'm not sure.
		I've got about 15 for a lot of different purposes.
		I live out in the Sticks here, not too far from Area 51 in the desert.
		And so I do most of my shopping on the Internet, Lauren.
		The Internet's damn well very important to me.
		And you're suggesting the Internet could go down in flames.
		You use the phrase Internet meltdown.
		That would really affect my life heavily, Lauren.
		What do you mean by Internet meltdown?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's very important to remember, as you're doing now, The good side of this, because the Internet is, when you come right down to it, a tool, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		A very important tool, Lauren.
		You notice you don't have people going door to door anymore selling encyclopedias.
		One of the reasons for that is because the encyclopedias in the little box there, you go to Google and you can find out about anything in the world.
		The importance of this can't be calculated.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Kids are growing up now who will never have known a world where you couldn't get the answer to almost any question a couple of seconds away at a screen sitting in their bedroom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's an amazing thing.
		But like any other tool, like a hammer, you can use a hammer to build a house.
		You can use a hammer to crack someone's skull.
		It's the user that controls what the tool is used for.
		And that's the same thing with the Internet.
		The meltdown that we're talking about mainly has to do with all these corruptions that are occurring of the net.
		And by corruptions, I mean both technical problems, spam, viruses, worms, all these kinds of things, and control problems, governance problems, the issue of who makes the rules for the Internet, who makes sure it's reliable, who makes sure it's secure, that you're not being spied on, that your privacy isn't being invaded.
		Because right now, it's a mess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know how you can go to your C drive, Lauren, and you can look at basically the contents of your computer, the various directories you have, and then down below that, of course, is the operating system files.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the other day I was looking at one of my computers, and I noticed that I have more megabytes of patches than I do operating system.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You must be running a Microsoft operating system.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes.
		And to keep up on all the current patches for all the current viruses, you do end up with more files that are patches to fix problems and holes and security problems than you do operating system itself.
		So if you want to take a moment and bash Microsoft have at it, I understand Apple people don't quite go down the same road.
		Is that true?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I really don't bash Microsoft on this.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Part of the reason that they've got the problem is because they're the 800-pound gorilla.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, and because they wrote it to be functional for users.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They really weren't thinking about the virus aspect of all this when they wrote it originally, were they?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Their whole attitude until fairly recently has been features first, which is an understandable commercial attitude.
		Of course it is.
		And what happened, though, is that a lot of those features were implemented without, in retrospect, appropriate attention being paid to the security aspects.
		So while they brought some nice bells and whistles for some situations, they did open up a lot of holes.
		Now Microsoft is now trying to get their act together on this.
		I think they're making a legitimate effort.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		But because 99% of people's PCs run Windows, that will continue to be the dominant target.
		The reason that Apple people, for example, have less of a problem partly relates to the technical functioning of the operating system, that the newer Apple systems are actually based on Unix underneath.
		But also because they represent a much tinier percentage of the users.
		So the people that write these viruses and spams and such will target the big one, the big kahuna and the other.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not a Microsoft basher.
		I use it.
		I like Microsoft.
		I like their products, and I go ahead and I load the patches.
		But I do note they're beginning to be larger than the operating system, and I was kind of laughing the other day looking at that.
		So it describes how big the problem really is.
		And could all this really come crashing down, Lauren?
		Could it really?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, interestingly enough, the most likely way for it to come crashing down is not necessarily a technical crash, but a sort of political control crash in terms of what's essentially a war that's starting to occur between these different large corporations and some government entities that are involved in all of this.
		The ISPs, for example, the Internet service providers, more and more are trying to control what their users do.
		And because of all these conflicts that are starting to occur, the probability is that the kind of meltdown we would see first would be fragmentation of the Internet, where it became harder and harder to do communications that weren't approved in one way or another or to contact people outside your particular, what they call, walled gardens.
		Now there are technical issues too that are occurring.
		Some of these are being triggered by companies.
		For example, .com, right?
		Right.
		The big domain.
		.com is controlled by VeriSign, a company called VeriSign.
		And VeriSign operates what's called the registry.
		So when you type a .com address, they're involved in figuring out where that address is and how you're actually going to connect to that site and all that kind of thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gotcha.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Some time back, fairly recently, they decided on their own that they were going to change the way .com worked.
		And they implemented a system that they thought would be commercially beneficial to them, to themselves.
		What happened, unfortunately, is that it broke lots of applications around the Internet.
		And there was a lot of yelling and screaming.
		And they ultimately turned off that application temporarily.
		Now, the odds are they're going to try to bring it back because they filed a lawsuit against the organization ICAN, which ordered them to turn it off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, let me understand, please, what they did.
		What did they do?
		What was the intent of what they did?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The intent of what they did was to try to deal with a situation where you type the wrong address into a web browser.
		Seems simple, right?
		So if you typed coast-to-coast AM and you spelled it wrong, instead of just getting an error message that said wrong site, no such site, something like that, you would get a special web page that they were presenting that would suggest to you various alternatives.
		And it would have other commercially oriented information and links on it also.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, Google does that to a degree.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Google, for example, if you mistype something, Google will come back and say, did you mean and it will give you a few alternatives.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that the sort of thing you're talking about?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		No, because what VeriSign did was make this change at a fundamental core level of the Internet.
		So it didn't just affect web applications, it affected all applications, including email, which meant that if you mistyped a domain address on a piece of email, that email actually got sent to them rather than where you wanted it to go.
		Or at least it tried to go to them is what actually happened.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my goodness.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And there's lots of others.
		The Internet is a lot of applications that are going on all the time beyond mail, beyond the web, beyond the obvious stuff.
		And it broke a lot of them.
		And what really got people upset was that they did this unilaterally.
		I mean, there are standards groups, there are people who are out there trying to make sure that the Internet runs properly because, again, there's no central authority.
		It has to be done on a cooperative basis.
		And VeriSign just said, hey, this is good for us.
		We think it's going to work great.
		We're just going to do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they actually, though, had the right to do that, though, didn't they?
		I mean, they're a private company, essentially.
		They're not a government agency.
		They're not regulated by a government agency that I'm aware of.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's funny about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Because VeriSign actually operates in a vested situation because they were chosen for this.
		They were originally part of a company.
		They had to do with a company called Network Solutions, and VeriSign bought them.
		But this was essentially a grant from the U.S. federal government, from the Department of Commerce to do this on a monopoly basis.
		So they're sort of like the local phone companies years ago.
		They got this power through a non-competitive means originally, so they've had a very privileged position.
		So it's very problematic as to whether or not it was appropriate for them to just make this decision on their own.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but however, technically, they are a privately owned and run company, right?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Right, but they do operate under a complex set of government rules and regulations because of the history relating to all of this.
		They don't own the Internet.
		And to the extent that they can just type a few keys on a keyboard and break, really break, I mean, people's printers stopped working around the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, that was one of the minor things that went wrong because the domain resolutions, people trying to look up domains, stopped working.
		That's a lot of power.
		One of the things we're looking at is is that kind of power being handled appropriately?
		We have laws to do that right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, fine.
		Let's talk a little bit about that.
		Are you making a case for government intervention, regulation, or laws?
		What are you making a case for here?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		We're making a case for balance, which doesn't exist right now.
		Now, it's important to realize that if we try just to let things run the way they are now, if we just say we want to maintain the status quo, we are going to fail.
		Because at the international level, things are happening right now that will impact the way the Internet is operated and controlled, relating to organizations such as the International Telecommunications Union.
		The UN is getting involved.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, to the extent that we don't want to act on this ourselves, we are ceding the power and the authority to others outside the U.S. Well, so far, the United States government has kept a pretty hands-off attitude with respect to the Internet, have they not?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The Department of Commerce has taken a very hands-off attitude in this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the reason for that being that they want it to develop and flourish in a free, untaxed, unregulated atmosphere?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that the idea?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I think that that's a good summary of the way they would describe it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On the other hand, you don't harvest a fruit before its time, do you?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Not if you don't want to get some.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		do you understand what I'm saying?
		If the Internet is a growing piece of fruit, then you allow it the freedom to grow until you're ready to pluck it.
		Now, that's a very cynical comment, I understand.
		But my guess is that they intend eventually to pluck it, as it were.
		In other words, email that is free to send today, someday I imagine, cost a penny or two or ten or twenty or who knows?
		But surely at some point, as the years roll along, Lauren, the government's going to get their fingers into this for revenue.
		They've got to.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		They will certainly endeavor to.
		Now, you mentioned paying for email.
		That, interestingly enough, is one of the recurring urban legends of the Internet, the mail tax story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know, but it's also a recurring suggestion by some people in the know as a way to nearly instantly stop spam.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, except it wouldn't work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It wouldn't work.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And in fact, there not only are suggestions of using actual cache to try to stop spam, but also various virtual kinds of cache, computational cache where you would have to burn a certain amount of computer time doing calculations in order to send a message.
		These are all things floating around in the anti-spam community which I spend a fair bit of time inside of.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But any of this would require some we come right back to the identifying something to identify the sender or none of that would work.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not only that, there's two other key things you need.
		One of them is if you're dealing with real money, you need a way to deal with micropayments.
		Tiny, tiny little payments, which is actually a much tougher nut to crack than some people think.
		The other thing you need, though, and this is the part you're not going to get, is some way to actually control the end applications.
		Because there is no way from a technical standpoint to mandate that these applications are going to work the way you want.
		Anyone can build their own mail program.
		A group of people could get together and design a whole new mail system if they wanted to and completely bypass the normal mail channels and bypass those costs.
		And they could hide this.
		They could make it look like something else.
		They could make it look like web pages.
		They could do anything.
		So my view of this, and there's people that will disagree with me, is that these pay-per-message schemes, at least in terms of using them to try to control spam, are doomed to failure.
		I understand the reason that they seem attractive.
		I don't think that they're going to be practical.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you don't see that as a solution to the spam?
		And you don't see it as a practical solution, even if you could do it, because you couldn't manage those kinds of tiny transactions.
		And if you did, it might not even be financially viable to do so?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It could cost you more to manage the infrastructure for doing that than you would get out of it in terms of payments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
		Well, where, if you were the government and you wanted a piece of the Internet, where would you get it?
		Consider that, Lauren.
		We're at the top of the hour.
		Lauren Weinstein is my guest.
		We're discussing the Internet.
		It's fascinating.
		On the Internet, you can be anything you want to be right now.
		And a lot of people want to be a lot of different things.
		Some of them not too tasteful.
		It's a strange but necessary place to modern life.
unidentified		Sweet dreams are made of this.
		Who am I to disagree with?
		Travel the world and never see.
		Everybody is looking for something.
		Some of them want to use you.
		Some of them want to get used by you.
		Some of them want to abuse you.
		Some of them want to be of you.
		Thank you.
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And worldwide on the Internet.
		Yes, indeed.
		It's that important.
		I mean, the Internet to our daily lives, how important?
		Well, I don't know about you.
		I do know a few people who swear off computers who wouldn't have a thing to do with them.
		Think they are the devil's work indeed.
		But for most everybody else, it is really that important.
		That's what we're talking about with Lauren Weinstein, and we'll get right back to it.
		Once again, Lauren Weinstein.
		Lauren, welcome back.
		Hi.
		Lauren, the Internet is challenging a lot of things.
		I mean, you can make telephone calls over the Internet.
		You can dial a number, and it flies through the Internet and dials locally on the other side of the country, and you have avoided a toll call.
		Every time you send an email, you do so virtually for free, eclipsing the need to jot something down, put a stamp on a letter, and send it.
		So the mail service, it seems to me, has got to be threatened by the Internet.
		Telephone service, mail service.
		Other services that are sent now through the Internet, I mean, they threaten a very large economic base, don't they?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, they threaten to change the numbers, change what's in what pile.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		So, for example, telephone companies, long-distance carriers, you would think would be threatened by voice over IT, telephone calls over the Internet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You would think.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		But when you look at it the other way, it's those same companies that are providing the Internet services.
		Right?
		Cable companies are providing telephone services.
		Well, SBC, for example, a big telephone company, provides DSL, they provide the infrastructure, the long-distance circuits that provide the Internet connectivity.
		So they sort of get the money either way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, for example, a company I know in Mexico City installs a T1 down in Mexico City for whatever purpose.
		And as part of that, they install a voiceover IP system so that when they pick up a telephone in Mexico City, they get a dial tone in Las Vegas, Nevada.
		And they dial locally as many calls for as long as they wish.
		Now, I guess you can say, gee, it still, you know, it just goes from one pile to another, but they're avoiding all kinds of long distance call charges.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, the incremental cost of long distance now is rapidly going down to zero even on the conventional phone network.
		I mean, call Europe, for example, it used to cost $12 for three minutes years ago, I remember that.
		Now it can be cheaper to call London than it is to call across Los Angeles if you've got the wrong kind of plan.
		What's probably more interesting, though, is the battle between the local phone companies and the long-distance companies when it comes to Internet calls because of what are called access charges.
		And that's the fees that the long-distance companies traditionally pay to the local phone companies for access to their circuits.
		And there's actually little hidden charges on our phone bills that deal with that.
		And Internet calls bypass a lot of that.
		So there's been a lot of fights, court fights, FCC rules, judgments, all kinds of things relating to that, and some interesting trickery that some companies have tried to pull to get around those charges.
		And another area where there's a difference is to the extent there's security and privacy issues that differ between voice over IP and conventional telephone because, again, our laws haven't kept up, and there's all kinds of interesting issues about how wiretaps affect these things and such.
		So they're not exactly equivalent, and there's issues beyond the money ones.
		I think in an era where long distance is getting so cheap, though, the issues for the end user in terms of the relative costs are getting vanishingly small.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is an interesting era.
		We live in an era when people drive airplanes into buildings and terrorists have networks.
		And these networks, it seems to me, Lauren, would find the Internet the ideal tool to communicate with each other and plan their terrorism, wouldn't you think?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You would think so, wouldn't you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I'm sure if Lauren and Art can figure that out, our government can too.
		And so where are we with what's being watched on the Internet?
		In other words, how carefully is the Internet monitored?
		If I send a message, what are my expectations of privacy, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		If you send an unencrypted message, that is it's plain text as you send it and plain text as received and you send it through your ISP's mail servers, the guarantee of privacy is relatively low.
		The probability of any given message being monitored is also relatively low unless you're a person of interest or fall into the sphere somehow of a net that's been cast in a particular place.
		The reason for this is just because the amount of traffic is so vast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What would tend to make you a person of interest, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, all it takes really is being physically in the topology of the Internet, where you're located, the servers you use, things like that, sharing facilities with somebody who was under surveillance, for example.
		There have been a lot of cases where the nets were a little bit too broad or very broad, sucking up a lot of people's materials that shouldn't have been.
		This ties in with systems.
		They used to be called Carnivore, things like that that are used to monitor network traffic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, could you become a person of interest, Lauren, just based, for example, on the websites you visit?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		That could happen, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because but again, the issue is would it happen?
		I mean, there's always this differential.
		The reason it could happen is because every access that is made is logged somewhere.
		And though it can take a little bit of work to track it back to an individual's computer, it can be done in almost all cases.
		Now, if someone walked into a public computer in a library or something, that's a different issue.
		You could track it, like you were saying earlier, you could track it to the computer.
		You wouldn't necessarily know who was standing there.
		But in the normal case of people who have dial-up accounts or DSL or cable modems, all of those things, every web access can be tracked.
		An ISP could track it at the ISP level, your local ISP.
		The websites that you visit almost certainly log it for their own purposes.
		So there are various vectors that information could be collected.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay.
		Just as an example, there are radical Islamic websites where al-Qaeda, for example, makes statements or, you know, whatever.
		I was reading about that earlier, that al-Qaeda said that they had killed this American.
		This is in the news right now.
		And that Americans were in danger.
		Well, that would be a website, for example, which it seems to me would be a flag.
		And if somebody in America was accessing that and other websites of that ilk, I would think somebody might be watching all that.
		What do you think, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, you run into the old problem when it comes to that kind of surveillance, which is that, yeah, you could argue that someone who was predisposed to agree with those points of view might visit those websites.
		On the other hand, people who were ardently opposed to those points of view would be visiting those websites also on the know thy enemy basis.
		And people who were doing investigations, reporters who were working on stories and want to track what these groups are doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But still, it might make you a person of interest.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, you're dealing with vast numbers.
		I doubt if that alone would be enough.
		But I think a more important point is that in all probability, the really nasty stuff, that the stuff that's really of concern when you talk about terrorists using the Internet are at a different level and are not somewhere where they're publicly visible.
		And it is so technically simple to obscure these things in ways that are basically undetectable that the really public stuff that you can see is unlikely to be the real problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're saying it is possible to escape responsibility for having written something or published something on a website entirely, and the authorities are just stumped?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		There has never been in the history of the world, I challenge anyone to come up with an example, of any technology that's ever existed that allows for one-to-many communications of the kind that the Internet presents today.
		And it's the old genie out of the bottle.
		You can't get the genie back in.
		And the technology is so powerful that the ways it can be used and the way things can be encrypted and obscured and hidden means that the world has changed.
		We talk about the world changing after 9-11.
		The world has also changed because of the Internet.
		And as you point out, a lot of those changes are wondrous and fantastic.
		And there are downsides, too.
		And not all of them can be fixed the way we might want to in a perfect world.
		That's just the reality of it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For the average person out there, let me ask this.
		As I mentioned to you, I live out in the boonies, so we do a lot of our shopping.
		For me, electronics, for my wife, she'll buy a dress or, you know, whatever on the Internet.
		And in doing so, you give your credit card information and the rest on a secure page.
		Should I regard that, and should my audience regard that, as absolutely safe as walking into a store and handing the clerk your credit card to swipe into the machine?
		Is there a great deal of difference between sitting on your home computer and ordering something on a secure page and buying it in the store?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Different risks in both cases.
		When you go into the store, you run the risk of a clerk running your card through a little recorder that gathers the number for themselves.
		I mean, that's a very popular fraud that goes on now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, and or it's sent across probably the Internet or God knows what, even a secure satellite link up to the company's main office where it's run through some other computers probably to the credit card company.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess my point is it's going to get on a network one way or another, whether you do it or whether someone else swipes it, isn't it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and in fact, the act of moving the data from your computer to the computer at the other end, assuming you're really dealing with a, quote, secure page, unfortunately, there have been a lot of cases of sites that were just misconfigured.
		They were just set up in stupid ways.
		I'm sure.
		Where they looked like they were secure, but they really weren't.
		But by and large, getting the data between the two points isn't the problem.
		The problem is what happens to the data at the other end.
		Because often those servers themselves and the people that run them are set up very badly.
		And there have been a lot of cases, I'm sure you've heard of it, where hackers have gotten thousands and thousands of credit cards at once.
		Now, they didn't crack any encryption or anything like that.
		The encryption between the PC and the computers was just fine.
		It was just that the servers had holes in the way they were set up, and so they got mass numbers of cards.
		Now, there's ways to do these things better so that that kind of thing is less likely to happen.
		But absolute security, no.
		You're never going to have that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I agree with you.
		Absolute security, no.
		So my question still remains.
		Am I basically as safe ordering something on the Internet as I am going into a store and ordering it that way?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I'll put it to you this way.
		If you're dealing with a known entity at the other end, a firm that you trust, a firm that you believe is competent and that you have reason to have faith in, then you should be in pretty good shape.
		If you're dealing with an unknown organization and you don't have time to do your homework and the research and who has that kind of time, then you might be better off dealing with a brick-and-mortar, walk-in-the-door kind of place locally, if you have a place locally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, because again, for years we've been buying things on the Internet, and it's always worked out well so far.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The thing is that just like with this tremendous amount of fraud in the credit card world, right?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I mean, massive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And it's basically buried.
		I mean, the individual user doesn't see it because if there's a problem on their credit card bill, they can call the bank and they'll get it credited back.
		But that's actually coming out of merchants' pockets and out of the whole system's costs that are built up.
		So the Internet becomes another factor in that whole cost structure that drives these prices up little by little.
		So it's just part of the equation, I guess.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it just seems the Internet is the way to go.
		If you want product X, you can go on the Internet and you can go shopping, courtesy of the power of a computer, for the best buy on that item.
		And there can be literally hundreds of dollars of difference in price.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it's a powerful tool.
unidentified		Right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Now, keep in mind that a lot of times when you find that best price, and I've had this happen myself, you'll go to one of these sites that does the comparisons, right?
		You see that for this particular camcorder, for example, there seems to be a $400 variation in the price to high and the low.
		And when you call the low, it's some weird Jose's Cameras, or something, somewhere, and you've never heard of it, but they've got a great price.
		And when you call them up, it turns out, well, they don't really have it in stock, and you can't get it unless you also buy the extra special carrying case.
		All those kinds of things start to happen.
		So that's one of the risks when you don't have a physical store nearby when if there's a problem, you can go back into the store and say, I want to see the manager.
		I want this fixed.
		And if you're dealing with some company on the other side of the country or maybe in another country, your leverage in those kinds of cases is considerably less.
		So that's a situation where the physical locality really can matter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much of what goes over the Internet is monitored?
		I mean, you briefly spoke of one case where they monitored.
		Where are we with Internet monitoring?
		Does government have giant computers looking for keywords now and that sort of thing?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, officially, we don't know, right?
		We know what we believe, but we don't know what we don't know.
		I'm not trying to be oblique about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What do you believe, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I believe that in terms of the totality of traffic on the Internet, the amount that is monitored is relatively small.
		I think it is probably much bigger now than it was a few years ago.
		I believe that the monitoring tends to be focused in places and on people of which there is, like I was saying earlier, some kind of interest already, just to make the amount of data being gathered manageable.
		Looking for keywords tends not to be very productive unless you're dealing with very unsophisticated targets, let's say.
		Because it's relatively unlikely that your typical terrorist is going to be speaking in plain, simple words that are easy to pick out about what they're doing.
		They're more likely to say, yes, the meeting is at 8.
		Who knows what that means?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The brick is red.
		Same kind of problem.
		And in fact, you pick up so much noise when you look for keywords.
		It's not as simple as just scanning the Internet for people talking about bombs and airplanes and buildings.
		It just doesn't work that way.
		But there is surveillance going on, clearly.
		There are increasing amounts of it.
		This is driving moves toward encryption.
		And encryption can't be controlled.
		You can't outlaw it effectively.
		So that takes us back to that same situation again where there are problems that just can't necessarily be solved, and we have a world that's very different than it used to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there encryption that cannot be broken?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That absolutely cannot be broken.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		From a theoretical standpoint, there is a kind of encryption that can't be broken if it's used properly.
		And that's one-time, what's called one-time pad encryption, which actually has a very long history, but it means that you have to have a good source of random numbers to use for your encryption.
		And you can never reuse those numbers.
		But if you do it right, and all of the high-level military codes have been using this kind of system for a long time, it is uncrackable.
		Now, that doesn't mean that people don't screw up using it.
		And in fact, the way these systems have tended to be broken is when people got sloppy in the way they were dealing with them.
		And then they can be cracked.
		But used right, used the way they're supposed to be used, good random source of numbers, you can't crack them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Uncrackable.
		All right, hold it right there.
		Lauren Weinstein is my guess.
		Only in America.
		Maybe not just in America anymore.
		Maybe it's all worldwide.
unidentified		In America.
		And I can't win out a second in a break.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		My guest is Lauren Weinstein, and if we haven't given you the Heebee GBs just yet, stick around.
		they're straight ahead.
		All right.
		We have discussed in some detail the internet, although we could do that all night, and probably We'll go to the phones at the top of the hour and let you ask questions.
		But a couple of other areas that I want to cover with you, Lauren.
		For example, the black boxes that are rumored to be in new cars.
		When you buy a new car these days, I'm told these black boxes, oh my gosh, they can record how fast you've been driving, how many miles you've been driving, all kinds of things about your driving that I suppose in a pinch the authorities would just love to know about in some cases.
		What's the real skinny on these black boxes, do you know?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, that's not a rumor, that's fact.
		They're definitely in there now.
		They started appearing originally in conjunction with airbags because the airbags need fairly sophisticated controllers to work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And since they were in there, and because typically there aren't laws controlling this kind of stuff, there we are again with our 19th century legal system.
		More and more functions have been added to them in terms of keeping track of not only accident type events, if you have an accident, they keep track of when the airbags deployed, what the speed was at the moment of impact, whether you had your foot on the brakes, that kind of thing.
		But more and more now they are keeping track of more routine data that can be read out with the appropriate equipment at repair stations, service stations, and things like that.
		Really?
		And there has been interest expressed, as you might imagine, from some government agencies, to have access to that data to charge people for speeding and all kinds of things like that.
		And there have been people convicted of serious crimes based on the data from those boxes.
		So, for example, someone was in an accident and they said, look, I tried to stop.
		I couldn't stop.
		I'm sorry, I hit the guy, that kind of situation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And if the black box says that, no, you didn't even touch your brake, then you've had it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you mean this information already, then, has been used in criminal trials?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And this has been.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When did they begin doing that, Lauren?
		How old is this technology?
		When did the black boxes begin to go into the cars?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I couldn't tell you the exact time without digging through the research material, but it was really when airbags started to come in that this stuff got started.
		And the use in criminal cases and things like that has been over the last few years mainly, I believe, as the technology has become more and more sophisticated.
		Now, one of the big issues here is that this has happened under the radar for most people.
		People buy their cars, and they don't realize that there's this kind of surveillance equipment built into it.
		So there are concerns that there should at least be laws that say that people have a right to know that it's there, to know what information is collected, to have access to the information, and that there should be laws that control how that information is used and who has access to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why, for example, would that not fall under, let's say, a Fourth Amendment or either Fourth Amendment or self-incrimination?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess you could look at either one.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It very well might.
		I think the problem is that this kind of stuff hasn't been adjudicated yet.
		It hasn't really gotten into courts enough.
		It's fairly new in terms of these applications.
		So that's an area where legislators and judges haven't yet taken the time to deal with it.
		So as usual, people end up on the short end of the...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So they're in there.
		It's not a myth.
		They're really in there.
		And this RFID tracking, can you tell us what RFID is?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I just wanted to add one thing on the black boxes.
		Fire away.
		There's another aspect of this which can go even further, which is a lot of people have systems like OnStar, for example.
		These systems nowadays have full GPS global positioning satellite systems in them.
		And they can also record information about where you are and where you've been.
		And they have been used to recover, obviously, stolen cars.
		They have been used to, when police have asked for information on a given car at a given time, there have been cases of cars that have been modified so that the driver didn't even realize that special things were going on through these specialized communication systems to track them.
		So the technology in these boxes is becoming vaster.
		In some countries, there have actually been calls for every car to have GPS systems in them.
		And this also has happened in some states here in the U.S. There have been calls for this so that people could be charged a tax based on when they travel the roads and whether the road was busy that day and so they want to know where you traveled and when you did it and all of that.
		So this is a growth industry, we might say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Obviously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		RFID.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		RFID.
		It's promoted by the folks who like it as a super barcode, like a super version of the UPC code, the bars on the products and such.
		What it actually is, is a little transponder, there are different kinds, that picks up a radio signal that's transmitted at it, and in its simplest form, sends back an ID code that's received at the other end, a unique ID code.
		And this could be used on products to give you a checkout without having to scan, because you just kind of go by the sensor, and you could read your whole supermarket card at once, in theory, right?
		Wow.
		Which sounds kind of neat.
		Now, the problems that have come up is that most of these things don't turn off after you leave the store.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've noticed that.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		So you could have a situation where everything you buy and everything you use, and people are talking about having this RFID technology on just about everything, could be tracked later.
		So you could be walking down the street and anybody could just be kind of waving a wand or maybe be 50 feet away.
		You wouldn't even know It and keeping track, they know what's in your wallet.
		There's talk about putting RFID in money.
		This is very seriously under consideration for the Euro, and it could come our way, so you could kind of add up the contents of someone's wallet from a distance.
		That might be interesting.
		And of course, then there's the issue of RFID implants, which was sort of a science fiction-y thing a few years ago, but isn't anymore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know they put them in pets, right?
		So that you can get your pet back if it's lost.
		That seems like a benign application of it.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		A laudable purpose indeed.
		Yes, but the same technology, in fact, promoted by the same people who make the pet inserts, is also being promoted for being implanted in people.
		And while it is possible to look at some of the applications that are being promoted, and these are things like, well, somebody has Alzheimer's disease and they wander off, you want to be able to find them if they don't have any ID, this kind of thing.
		In reality, what's being looked at here is much broader applications.
		There have actually been promotions where people are saying, well, this will be great.
		You get the implant, and then when you go to the store, you can check out by waving your hand.
		Well, okay, I guess that's for some people.
		That might be a good thing.
		But you can't turn them off, right?
		So everywhere you go, you're essentially broadcasting, in effect, if there's a transmitter nearby, who you are, your ID for everyone to know.
		And I think what will probably happen is that we'll find calls for these applications first in people who don't have any choice in the matter, where there won't be arguments about it too loudly, right?
		You could picture people saying, well, prisoners should have these implanted, whether they like it or not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Registered sex offenders, right?
		I mean, these are things where you're not going to get a lot of argument from people at large.
		But that's where it starts.
		And then pretty soon you've got the chips in everyone, and then the world is very much different.
		Is that a nightmare scenario?
		Well, it depends on your point of view.
		It depends on what kind of society you want.
		Is that kind of thing likely to happen?
		Yeah, I think it probably is unless we take a serious look again at the laws and personal privacy and how we want to draw the balance between security and privacy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, had there been such a system fully operative, perhaps 911 never would have occurred.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that's true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm simply making a suggestion.
		I'm not saying I believe that that should happen.
		I'm just saying if personal identification was universal, then maybe they could not have done what they did.
		Or maybe, on the other hand, everything can be broken.
		All codes can be broken, they say.
		You argue with that a little bit.
		But everything can be pirated, it seems like.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Not only can you not necessarily trust the mechanism of the identification, and that leads into biometrics, too, if you want to talk about that, fingerprints and eye scans and things like that.
unidentified		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		But you have to be able to trust the underlying information.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		So, for example, if you have, and this goes into things that people are dealing with right now, a lot of the things going on at airports, the whole CAPS2 system that's going into place now to do a background check on people going to airports or the trusted traveler cards that they'll be giving out soon to people that meet certain criteria so they don't get as much scrutiny at airports.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, I just went through a hellish experience at an airport going to New York.
		I'll tell you what.
		Just manage to walk through and forget one little item, beep, and they will take you in the back and they will swipe and sniff everything that you have.
		I mean, it is, flying is just not the joy it once was.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And the worst part of it is that when you have these systems in place that will make it easier for some people to get through security than others, you have basically opened up a giant hole in your security system for what we might call deep cover agents who live here.
		They live exemplary lives.
		They have their credit cards.
		They qualify for all the benefits.
		They get the frequent traveler card.
		They only have to succeed once because you're dealing with people in some cases who don't care if they come back.
		And so a trusted traveler card can turn into a trusted terrorist card if this kind of scenario plays out.
		And what that tells us is just because you have an ID card from someone or an implanted chip or a biometric identification, even assuming you can trust the biometric identification, doesn't mean that the decisions you're going to make about that person, whether they're a good person or a bad person, a trustworthy person or an untrusty person, are accurate.
		You might know that it's person A, but you don't know if the information you have about person A is any good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		That's right.
		I understand completely.
		Moreover, we're moving into a totally wireless world.
		Most people I know have cell phones.
		I have a cell phone.
		Most people don't know that when you carry a cell phone, you could be tracked, couldn't you?
		In other words, a cell phone company, pressed, could probably tell someone exactly where you are or darn close.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Absolutely.
		Within certain variations of accuracy, depending on a bunch of parameters.
		But basically, the answer is yes.
		And that's whenever your phone is turned on, regardless of whether you're making a call or not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it started off.
		In the earlier days, the information was fairly limited.
		I mean, it's sort of intrinsic to the system because you have these cell towers or you have the antennas that are scattered everywhere.
		The system has to know where you are so that it communicates with you through the correct tower and the correct antennas.
		Yes.
		But because of FCC mandates related to emergency services, 911, extended 911, there were mandates on all the telephone carriers that they be able to do very, very accurate location tracking, down To just a few feet in some cases is a kind of complicated formula they use.
		But there were not restrictions put on how that information could really be used.
		It wasn't like they said, well, you can only use this for 911, you can only use it for emergencies.
		So immediately, people started looking at commercial applications and other applications.
		And again, we've already had court cases where people have had their records polled and the tracking information pulled.
		And they said, well, according to our records, you were here.
		It doesn't matter what you say.
		So that's the reality.
		That's right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, is there any going back?
		I mean, you've already said we've got a 19th century legal system trying to address a 20th century, seemingly almost 21st century scientific advance.
		I mean, it's going so fast that privacy and the Fourth Amendment is just going to vaporize if it already hasn't.
		I mean, you might even make an argument that it's already vaporized right in front of us.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The steam is forming at this moment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it's a Wi-Fi kind of world.
		That's clearly where we're headed.
		Everybody's going to have a little portable device that gives them access to the World Wide Web and the World Wide Web access to them, I guess.
		And we're going to carry all kinds of devices with us, some of which we know about, others of which are buried deep in our cars or whatever.
		All these things keeping track of us.
		I mean, where do you picture, if you were a futurist, Lauren, that the world is headed?
		I mean, already we've come to a new destination.
		Where are we going?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I am not in the glass half-full camp when it comes to this, as you might imagine.
		My view of it is that right now we are living in the golden age.
		And people in the future will look back on us, and it will seem like a different universe, because the whole concept of individuality, the way we view it now, of privacy, those things will be archaic terms.
		They will be studied in history classes when privacy was something that people expected.
		What an oddball group of people those were back in the early 21st century.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		To have the expectation of privacy.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's going to go away.
		You can see the trends right now.
		For example, cameras are popping up everywhere, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And one of the arguments that's made by law enforcement, for example, is, and they have legitimate interests.
		They want to catch criminals and such, is that there's no expectation of privacy in public places.
		The problem with that logic when you start putting cameras everywhere and linking them into these vast networks, though, is that at some point it becomes like having a little guy in a raincoat holding a clipboard following everyone around.
		Only a technical version of that.
		Where any time you step out your door, you are immediately subject to tracking wherever you go.
		There are systems in England now, they have systems that are reading license plates as people come and go from London to tax them appropriately.
		Those kinds of systems are starting to pop up here, too, that read license plates.
		You start to have a situation where you can't leave your house without having all your movements followed.
		I don't think people would put up with that if they were being followed by real human beings recording everything they did, every store you went to, everywhere you drove.
		But because it's done with technology, because it's done with cameras, we're supposed to be less concerned about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how concerned should we be?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think we should be very concerned.
		That's not to say that the legitimate interests of law enforcement in terms of catching criminals and stopping terrorism, these are very important things.
		The problem is that we don't want to proverbably here throw the baby out with the bathwater.
		We could create an extremely secure society through technology if we want to.
		That will not be a free society, however.
		It will be very different from the United States of America that we've been pledging allegiance to all these years.
		Now, if people want to do that, that will be their decision.
		I think that that's something we haven't thought about enough.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, so far, I'll take the safety over, you know, what is it, safety over.
		Anyway, people are giving away their privacy in droves, and they're hardly even thinking about it.
		It's just sort of something, you know, when you go to the airport, you understand why you get taken apart.
		So far, people are very much accepting it, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're accepting it, but I think part of the reason is that they don't necessarily understand the fundamentals of what's going on.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		For example, you go to the airport and you can get into a lot of trouble for having a pair of tweezers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		But you're allowed to bring on board your sharp pens, your umbrella, liquids in your suitcase that might be anything, all manner of things that are much more serious weapons.
		So airport security, like most security, is largely an issue of perception.
		The perception of security is at least as important as the reality of it.
		And it's been that way with airport security all along.
		It's understandable why that happens, but that doesn't make it any more honest.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you saying the security that we now have at airports is only a perception?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Largely, yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		If someone really wants to get through with something that can do damage, they can do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They want to give their lives to take others, they can do it.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lauren, hold on.
		All right, we're going to go to the phone shortly, and I...
		Really a tough one.
		Let's see what you all do with it.
		Lauren Weinstein is my guest, and of course, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		I'm on the street, I was talking to a man.
		I'm on the street, I was talking to a man.
		There's something happening here.
		what it is ain't exactly clear.
		There's a man with a gun over there Telling me, I got to beware.
		I think it's time we stop.
		Children, watch that sound.
		Everybody look what's going down guitar solo There's battle lines being wrong.
		Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
		Young people speak in their minds are getting so much resistance from behind.
		We stop that sound.
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free, 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast Again with Art Bell.
		Isn't it strange, everybody?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How words written 40 or 50 years ago still apply perfectly today?
		Warren Weinstein Weinstein is my guest.
		We're going to light up the phones, and you've got plenty to ask about.
unidentified		We're going to light up the phone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I suppose it's a natural evolution that we're going through.
		Lauren Weinstein is my guest, and we're talking about issues of privacy as it relates to the internet, OG, your automobile, your own face on a camera somewhere.
		In other words, the totality of your life being followed.
		Every step you take, every move you make being followed.
		Lauren, welcome back.
		One more thing I want to ask you about, and then we're going to go to the phone.
		It's going to be very interesting to see how people react to all of this, understanding all of this.
		There are reports, rumors, perhaps, a myth, perhaps, that there are people working on machines that literally can determine, for example, if you are a terrorist or a criminal or have dark thoughts, or in other words, some machine that can in some way detect brain waves and virtually read your mind.
		Is there anything like that?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry to report that there is technology like that that has been developed.
		The level of accuracy is a matter of some dispute, but it is in its infancy and it is an area that people are watching very closely.
		The way it works, it's called, generically, it's called brain fingerprinting, brain printing, different ways.
		But it operates on the theory that if, for example, you have seen something, you have been at a murder scene where the public has not been, that if you are shown a photo of that place, your brain will react to seeing that photo again, seeing that place again, where an ordinary person who hadn't been there wouldn't react that way.
		And this will be a physical reaction in the brain that can be detected through a particular brain wave reaction that could be recorded.
		And when this particular wave appears, this particular electrical pattern appears, that would, according to these systems, be proof that you had been there before.
		Similarly, the idea is that if you were shown pictures of terrorist activity, for example, and if you were of that ilk, your brain would react in a certain way.
		You couldn't stop it.
		You couldn't prevent it.
		There'd be no way to control your thoughts.
		It would be at a subconscious level.
		And that also would be indicated to these systems.
		This is very much at the bleeding edge of these technologies, but it appears that there may actually be some reality to this and that it is definitely not a science fiction sort of concept.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		All of this, if you really consider what it means, is rather difficult to digest.
		And as you pointed out, I guess our children are going to look back on perhaps our generation as the last of the great privacy, back in a day when a person actually had the expectation of privacy.
		And that day will just be gone.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		But remember that in the future, these kids, the people that grow up then, won't even really know what they have lost.
		That's the really sad part about it.
		They will grow up in a world where the very concept of privacy is just antiquated and meaningless.
		And most people won't even know that there's something missing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, when these future generations, I mean, at some point, this antiquated legal system that you talked about and reality are going to collide heavily, and how do you leave the Fourth Amendment intact, its wording, and maybe some of the other amendments, for that matter?
		You can't leave it there any longer.
		You've got to change that, don't you?
		Otherwise we don't even have a resemblance to reality any longer in legal or yeah I think it it has to be changed.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It would have to be changed to cause the sorts of negative things to happen that we're talking about.
		But that goes on already.
		I mean, that's how the Supreme Court works.
		It reinterprets the Constitution based on the existing world.
		And I would expect that to continue happening.
		If there's a sense in society that people want to give up privacy, that they want a different kind of society where privacy is no longer important and where a sort of what I'll call a police state mentality would be considered preferable.
		That may be a decision people will make, and I think the courts will eventually go along with that way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but an interpretation can only go so far.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When our privacy rights really are completely gone, then the Fourth Amendment has no meaning at all, and it will have to be redacted or changed or something.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, but remember, privacy per se isn't really in there exactly.
		There is no specific amendment that addresses privacy.
		And everything that we have that relates to privacy and law is based on interpretations and broad definitions.
		So those could be narrowed down.
		If as a society we make the decision that we're not interested in privacy, I think the courts will find a way to meet our wishes in that regard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Here we go.
		First time caller line.
		You're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi.
unidentified		How are you doing, Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, sir.
unidentified		Is Lauren talking this machine that will measure brain waves to detect guilt?
unidentified		Anything related to that machinery I've been hearing about in the last year regarding tells that your face is flushed, that you are lying because blood is rushing to your eyeballs and forehead area?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Actually, it does broadly enter into the same area because it does have to do with biometric measurements of looking for physical changes in the body that you can't control.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And changes in the mindset.
unidentified		Even if you're a terrorist?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Excuse me?
unidentified		I mean, even if you're a terrorist, the kind of person who is a cold-blooded, his mind is made up killer.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The theory behind these systems, and you can believe it or not, it has yet to be demonstrated rigorously, is that there are certain biological functions that you can't control.
		I mean, that's supposed to be the theory behind polygraphs, behind lie detectors.
		Now, we know those can be beaten by some people.
		It may prove to be the case that people can beat these other systems too.
		But at the moment, the claims are that they can't be beat.
		We shall see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		While we're on the subject of lie detectors, Lauren, I am curious.
		I've always been curious about this.
		I've always heard, oh, you know, there are people who can beat them.
		Are there really?
		And how prolific are these people?
		How many people can beat lie detectors, for example?
		Do you know any figures on that?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I don't have statistics on it.
		I mean, one of the problems, of course, is that if someone's really good at beating a lie detector, you wouldn't know that they beat it.
		You would just think that they passed it.
		So the only time you know someone beat a lie detector is if they passed a test and then later on you found out they were lying.
		Otherwise, it just looks like a normal pass.
		So it's hard to get statistics on that.
		But there are lots of documented cases of people.
		I mean, some of the biggest spies who have been convicted in this country passed numerous lie detector tests.
		So there's absolute clear evidence that some people are just not going to cooperate physically with those systems.
		And of course, there's interpretation involved in reading a polygraph also.
		So you get a number of things that can vary.
		But there are a lot of people who consider polygraphs to be basically voodoo and not really to be science at all.
		It's interesting that polygraph results are generally not acceptable in court, but they are used by, for example, our security agencies for screening purposes.
		Now, why they're good enough for one and not for the other, you can read that either way, but that technology does have a lot of people who don't really believe in it.
		That's one thing for certain.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Wildcard Lying, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		This is Matt from 1170.
		And I really do not understand how you would say that a computer could tell if someone was lying or not.
		A machine could in any way, anyway, decide whether or tell you about a person's emotions or anything physical about a person.
		How can a machine with another human interpreting it tell you anything about that person?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question, Lauren.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, how does that occur?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you buy the arguments of the people who are promoting these new systems, let's talk about the brain fingerprinting one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Because that's certainly the one that's the scariest to me when I think about the ramifications of something like that for privacy in the future.
		The theory is, what we're being told is that this is something that's fundamental in the structure of the brain.
		And that when you see, when you are presented with a photo of something that makes you react in certain ways or a scene that you've seen before, you can't control how your brain is going to react, not at the level that these machines are looking at.
		If that's true, then that kind of system will be vastly more accurate than a polygraph, which is actually just looking for variations in much broader kinds of things, respiration.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So it will replace the polygraph, of course.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Oh, if the brain fingerprinting systems pan out, I'm sure they'll replace polygraphs.
		Now the question is going to be, how are these systems going to be controlled?
		Are employers going to be able to use it?
		Can they sit you down and say, look, we're missing five gallons of paint from the stock room?
		Are you the one that took it?
		I mean, it's going to be like Captain Quig on the Cain Mutiny trying to find the missing strawberries.
		Are they going to wheel out the brain scanner willy-nilly without appropriate legal controls on it?
		It would change the world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's back up a little bit in biometric identification.
		For example, in a lot of modern movies, you see people required to stare into a machine, and the machine reads their iris or their eyeball or whatever it does.
		How good is that?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		There's two ways those things are done.
		There's retinal scans that require basically more cooperation from the user because you've got to get closer to the scanning device.
		And then there's iris scans, which can be done actually at a distance, because if you can just get a good shot of the eye, you can look at the patterns in the iris, which are supposed to be unique.
		The claim, again, is that both of those systems are supposed to be foolproof.
		Now, we originally heard the same thing about that regarding fingerprint biometric systems.
		And then a researcher discovered that he could fool virtually every fingerprint scanner on the market using a high-tech piece of material called gummy bears.
		And he was able to build fake fingers using gummy bears.
		Later, he found even better cheap materials.
		He could even simulate the temperature of the finger in case the scanners were looking for that.
		He was able to beat basically all of them.
		So there's a lot of question about the reliability of even iris scans and retinal scans.
		But the funny part about it is, and I mean funny sick, not funny, ha ha, is that if, again, we talked about this a little earlier, even if you have a biometric match, that doesn't mean that the information you have related to that and that person means anything.
		Another really creepy part about biometrics is that people don't think about a lot is what happens if your information is compromised somehow, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And it's screwed up.
		It's compromised.
		What are you going to do as an individual who's been hurt by this?
		Are you going to go out and get a new retina, a new iris, perhaps new fingers?
		I mean, the problem with biometric measures is if they're compromised, you can't change them.
		It's not like a password.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're up the creek.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
		You could become a non-person.
		If the world evolved where it was using all of these things, you could virtually disappear as far as the system is concerned.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Into the Twilight Zone.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Brother.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yes, this is Michael.
unidentified		I'm just south of Cincinnati, Ohio right now.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And on a cell phone, right?
unidentified		Yes, sir, I am.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's see, that'd be 26.4 miles south of Cincinnati if our readings are right here.
		Go ahead.
		Just kidding.
unidentified		I have a quick comment and a question.
		You were talking about black boxes earlier.
		I'm a third-generation truck driver, and I can remember back in the mid to late 80s, companies could purchase these black boxes and put them in trucks and monitor how their drivers drove their trucks.
		And I remember my father and my grandfather just throwing an absolute fit over it.
		And nowadays, with all companies having satellite communications, I can look at my little keyboard over here and see how I'm driving my own truck.
		It's become the norm.
		So it's, you know, it's just one of those deals.
		But my question is, I'm kind of out of the loop when it comes to computers and internet doing the job that I do, but I keep hearing about this spyware.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
unidentified		And my question is, you know, who uses it?
		What's its purpose?
		And what could it be used for other than what it's designed for?
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, good question.
		Spyware, Lauren.
		Let's cover it.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, spyware broadly defined is any software that's in your computer that is sending information out to someone else somewhere without your knowledge and or permission.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What's common?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And what's common is especially the most common, perhaps you could say the most benign version of these is systems where you get some software that says it's free, but it gives you ads that are relevant to you, perhaps.
		But the way it determines that is by tracking what websites you visit, sending that information off over the Internet to some server somewhere, where decisions are made about what ads to send back to you.
		That's perhaps the most benign, though a lot of people find that very objectionable anyway.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And at its worst?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		At the worst, it could do anything to your computer, transmit the entire contents of your disks, change any information, put child pornography on your computer that you don't know is there, anything you can imagine in your darkest nightmares.
		Because once one of these programs has access to your computer, because of the way computers are designed now and the operating systems, it has total access.
		And you could download one of these spyware systems, particularly the nefarious ones that could monitor everything you do.
		They can see your screen.
		They can see the keys you type.
		It could be hidden in any program you download.
		And it's almost impossible to know what they're doing unless you have software that is watching the Internet connection very carefully to look for data traffic moving in and out of your computer that shouldn't be there.
		But to the normal person, the lights are blinking.
		You're not paying attention.
		You don't know what data is moving.
		So the possibilities are really endless.
		So it goes all the way from sort of benign to disastrous.
		You end up in jail.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the protection against this would be a program that would watch the outgoing or the data going both ways, really.
		But how would it delineate?
		It might delineate only in the amount of data being sent, but surely it can't look at the nature of the data.
		So how reliable could that be?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		There are commercial programs that attempt to detect spyware to varying degrees of success.
		And part of the way they do that is to look for traffic that shouldn't be there.
		So for example, if you're looking at a website, just looking at a simple website, it would be considered odd for there to be just this kind of strange flow of data associated every time you change pages going off to some server unrelated to the site you're looking at.
		Now determining that in a final kind of way is very complicated and error prone.
		But what tends to happen is over time people learn where the bad spyware is and then they can look for those servers.
		They can say if traffic is going out to this server, you know you've got a problem.
		Why is this traffic going to Croatia when you're looking at a site in Silicon Valley?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are there any laws that protect against that?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		In general, at this point, there has been very little in the legal system to protect you from this.
		The Federal Trade Commission has been actively working in this area now, and I expect we will see more protections.
		But again, keep in mind that that can only work domestically.
		The Federal Trade Commission, U.S. government agencies only have domestic authority, and these kinds of problems can easily be international in nature and can come from places where there is very little concern about protecting people in these regards.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Like from China, right?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		China or anywhere.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold on.
		Trying to give you an idea of the world you're living in right now.
		How do you like it?
		Lauren Weinstein is my guest, and in the middle of the night, in the middle of a hot one, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		Way down the street, there's a light in his place.
		He opens the door, he's got that look on his face.
		And he asks you where you're in.
		You tell him you've seen, and you talk about everything.
		He's got this dream about finding some land.
		He's gonna give up the booze and one night's stand.
		And then he'll settle down to quiet a little down and forget about everything.
		But you know he's always keep moving.
		No, he's never going to stop moving Cause he's rolling through He's the road to storming to talk with Art Bell.
		Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From West to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ArtVell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with ArtVell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You are getting a glimpse this morning of the kind of world that's coming.
		Really, part of it's already here, but the rest is coming.
		and it doesn't send a little chill down your spine, well, then you're just not listening.
		So how do you like the glimpse of the world you're in and the world that's coming?
		Lauren Weinstein, once again, Lauren, what's on your website?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's two websites of possible interest.
		On the Vortex.com website, there's the Privacy Forum, which discusses a lot of these privacy issues, some related to the Internet and some more broad, even non-technical privacy issues.
		And the other is the pfir.org website for people for Internet responsibility.
		And we are trying to create people who will be responsible with the Internet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Or at least get existing people to do it.
		And that has a lot of position papers and discussions of the specific kinds of topics we've been talking about.
		Some privacy, security, who's going to control the Internet, spyware, hacking, all these kinds of concerns, and how we hope to deal with it.
		It also has an announcement for our Preventing the Internet meltdown conference, which is next month here in Los Angeles, where we'll be bringing together people to try to come up with specific action plans to try to make some of this stuff better.
		So even though I think we're looking at a very dark future, we are still trying to at least hold off the day of reckoning when it comes to that, make things a little bit better for now, and whether we'll succeed or not, we'll find out.
		But I think it's worth the battle in any case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you were a, knowing all you know, Lauren, if you were of dictatorial power and you could mandate what would and would not happen with reference to the Internet and even other privacy issues, what would you mandate in a perfect world?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I don't think I can answer that question because part of the reason we're bringing these groups together, these people together, is to try to figure out exactly what the right way to answer that question would be.
		I do believe that the answer has to do with balance.
		You can't really operate this kind of environment without some input from government.
		On the other hand, it has become apparent that too much input from government can have lots of negative impacts as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Well, in the legal system, we use the measure of what a reasonable person might do.
		Is that probably applicable here?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I think it may well be applicable if we assume enough exposure and understanding of the issues and technology involved.
		Unfortunately, if people haven't had the time, and this is what usually happens, people have lives.
		They're busy.
		They don't have the time to read all the fine print and the click-through licenses and all these sorts of things.
		So they have to make their decisions in a lot of cases based on hype.
		And then you don't necessarily get good decisions.
		But if people had the true story, and that's why I'm so glad that you've devoted this show to this topic tonight and this morning, it's this kind of discussion that helps to give people enough to go out there and look for more if they're interested and really get to understand these issues.
		And that's where we can really start to move in what I think would be the right direction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Otherwise, it's head in the sand, huh?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, otherwise, it's just head in the sand and meltdown.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, first-time caller line.
		You're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, my name's Barb.
unidentified		I'm calling from Erie County, New York, WBEN area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Barb.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		I love your show, and you have a terrific voice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		And while my life has been a living HELL since February 16th of 2004, I had a coworker create profiles on pornographic internet sites with my name, address, everything, Social Security number, phone number.
		I have trucks going by my house beeping the horn continually.
		I've reported it to every single police agency in Erie County, all the way up to the FBI.
		They're quote unquote conducting an investigation, which apparently is stalled.
		The person is a self-professed member of the Aryan Nations and allegedly the Ku Klux Klan.
		I've had, and he's also a gun freak.
		I've also had my identity stolen by the same individual, and I've been slammed for probably $1,500 worth of cell phone calls.
		That's why I'm on prepay now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
		All right.
		Well, that's enough right there.
		Lauren.
		There's a big-time victim.
		I mean, that's unimaginable.
		Somebody goes and creates a profile for you on all kinds of porn sites.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, part of the reason things like that are possible is that a lot of sites don't do reasonable verification of information.
		I mean, if, for example, someone is creating a profile, it has an address and a phone number and an email, there are certain reasonable steps.
		There's that word reasonable again, that could be taken to at least do rudimentary checking of that information to make sure it's valid and call the person back, make sure it's really them.
		There's things you can do.
		But obviously a lot of sites don't even try to do the minor things.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What can you do to undo the kind of thing that's been done to this young lady?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you undo it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Once it's spread, once it's gone from the original source to other entities, it's very, very difficult.
		If credit reports and things like that have been damaged, then it's possible to go to the credit reporting agencies and there are mechanisms for correcting those.
		But in general, this is one of those situations where once the data has been corrupted, it can be damaged for a long time.
		And incidentally, this is worth thinking about when we talk about trusted databases and trying to decide who might be a terrorist and who might not.
		There's a lot of bad data out there, sometimes because of accidents, sometimes because, as in this person's case, someone purposely planted bad information.
		In this case, it was financial information, but you can imagine how other kinds of information could be manipulated in the same way.
		So it's very dangerous to have too much faith in these databases because you can see that the information can be often far from accurate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you can't unring that bell right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		In other words, she might be getting Internet solicitations for porn from now until she dies.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You can deal with the credit cards, you can deal with the credit reports, you can deal with the banks, those kinds of things.
		It's a hassle and a half, but it's doable.
		But in terms of solicitations and things like that, that's going to be more problematic.
		In some cases, when it's physical mail, you can go to the Postal Inspection Service for those kinds of situations.
		They will try to help, but it's a very difficult situation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about law enforcement?
		She said, look, I went to the FBI, that sort of thing.
		Are they equipped to handle the massive amount of things like this that are going on?
		People are going to be able to do it.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		You just said the key words.
		They don't have the facilities.
		They have to focus on what they consider to be priority issues.
		They don't have the manpower or the resources to deal with this kind of thing.
		And unfortunately, there really aren't other levels of government that have those facilities either.
		There are sometimes private organizations that will try to help nonprofits and things like that.
		But it's just a very bad scene all around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, I'll see.
		All right.
		Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi, Ayn.
unidentified		Yeah, hi, Art.
		Hi, Lauren.
		I saw a show on television recently where a bunch of college students, computer science majors, took a bunch of off-the-shelf PCs and attempted to form basically a supercomputer out of several units.
		But the point of my question is more what sort of damage could a terrorist organization do if they, in fact, had a supercomputer or something close to it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I don't think supercomputers are really on the terrorist agenda.
		The kinds of number crunching that are done for those things are useful for cracking codes, but that's mainly the opposite side of what they're involved with.
		They're useful for weather predictions and things like that, large-scale numerical analysis.
		But I think the kinds of computers that terrorists are more likely to be interested in are just the off-the-shelf PCs running off-the-shelf applications, basically.
unidentified		Could I ask you one more thing?
		Do you think as a dissuasion against people writing these viruses and attacking people's computers that such acts could be classified as terrorism?
		It might dissuade them from doing so?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		I think the problem is that you run the risk when doing that of sweeping into that net a lot of basically immature people who don't really deserve to be classified that way.
		That's not to say that someone that creates a destructive virus and is trying to steal credit card numbers with it and all that kind of thing shouldn't be treated very harshly.
		But you find that a lot of these things are created by 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds who don't really understand what's going on.
		I don't really see, in terms of the ramifications of what they're doing, I don't see what the benefit would be of classifying something like that as terrorism.
		It's going to have to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have a lot of comments which I'm going to withhold about the 13 and 14-year-olds.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
		Hi.
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		This is Jane calling from Florida to say that the Nigerian scam is alive and well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
unidentified		My husband was one of the big fishes and has been totally addicted for the last two years to the tune of $400,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
unidentified		And he has destroyed the family, the marriage.
		It's a really bad situation.
		And my question to Lauren is: what would the repercussions be to my husband were I to report him to the Secret Service or the FBI?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm assuming here that your husband is a victim.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It sounded that way.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so I'm not sure what the point would be of you don't normally turn in a victim in something like this.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		So I may not be understanding.
unidentified		Well, I need to put a stop to this, and he cannot stop it himself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean he's addicted to continually answering and sending money?
unidentified		$90,000, $70,000, up to $400,000.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My God.
unidentified		The retirement package is gone.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
		I would two things.
		I mean, first off, I don't think you would find government agencies interested in this because he is not committing a crime.
		He is the victim of a crime.
		Correct.
		However, and I say this just based on what you are telling me without all the facts of the case, obviously, there may be a situation here where it's possible that his behavior could be classified as incompetent.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		May we inquire a little bit?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, once somebody had been burned, as unlikely as it seems, that somebody would fall for one of those Nigerian scams, why would he continue to fall for it?
unidentified		Because he's addicted, and he thinks that he's going to be one of the 100,000 that's going to get lucky, and $25 million will put in our bank account.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's a disease.
		It's like gambling.
		It's the same kind of thing.
unidentified		The documents that are sent look very legal.
unidentified		He sends them back and forth to the tune of $85 per mailing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		That's astounding.
		That's astounding.
		So I guess your advice, Lauren, is the only...
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		The only way that something like this could be controlled would be to demonstrate that he is not behaving in a way that a rational person would behave.
		And then there are avenues that can be taken in terms of courts and rulings that can be made to put controls on what he can do with the bank accounts and such.
		I think that might be the only avenue to explore.
		Boy, of all the calls, I thought a very sad situation, and I wish I had something better to say about that, a better solution.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, thanks, Art, for taking my call.
		Hi, Lauren.
		I've subscribed to your newsletter for quite some time now.
		This poor lady, I mean, my first thought would be to write back to those people and say that if you attack my husband one more time, there's going to be a lot of enforcement action taken.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		They just disappear into the woods.
unidentified		I know.
		They're using so many different IP numbers.
		My question is on a very basic level, and that is the 800-pound gorilla that nobody has talked about, the dial-ups, the high-speed modems that neuter your operating system and DSL.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what do you mean neuter your operating system?
unidentified		DSL.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, what do you mean neuter your operating system?
unidentified		Well, what they do is they take your files of security stuff and put it in a separate folder in Windows Explorer and they make it a bare operating system so that they have complete access to what you are doing and then you have to go in and redo it.
		On top of that, in their contract, it says that it could damage your computer and they would have no responsibility for that.
		On top of that, there are address books, there are vice version of Internet Explorer.
		Vice version of Internet Explorer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, rather than addressing, I don't want to hurl around names here, but what about what he's saying, Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think what he's talking about is sort of a case of the everyone wants to control the defaults on the computer kind of situation.
		The different vendors of these things, whoever they happen to be, the competing ISPs and everything else, they all want to control the computer.
		And so what tends to happen is when you install their stuff, it basically takes over everything, in some cases undoes important things that you had set up.
		That doesn't only happen with modems and things, it also happens with various programs to play audio and video.
		You install a new one, and it just takes over all those other ones that you had installed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The thing is, though, that you're not reading the fine print, because as you install that application, it virtually tells you it's going to take these kinds of files and take over.
		And if you don't read it, which most people don't, I mean, they just keep clicking next, then you're doing it to yourself, really.
		It's a matter of reading in most cases, isn't it?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		In a lot of cases, it is explained, but in some of those cases, it is explained in a legalese that a lot of people don't really understand what it's saying.
		It's often not put in a very clear-cut way.
		But I think it would be reasonable for people to assume that it's not necessary for each program to completely take over the system.
		So this is one of those kind of, well, if we can do it, let's do it kind of philosophies in these software packages that can be very annoying to users at least.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is amazing, and I know exactly what you're talking about.
		One more, perhaps.
		International 9, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
unidentified		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
		Going once, going twice.
		Hello?
		Yes.
unidentified		Yeah, it's Chris.
		Listen, I wanted to know something about the pass-through laws that exist concerning banking laws and how certain machines and operating systems and languages at the bank cannot be corrupted.
		How can it be applied to Internet?
		And not only that, what about Ordonance laws, the ancient laws of the Europeans that would not allow certain images of people around the idolatry thing?
		And only that, what about policing the Internet with some sort of quantum shift copper or cabal or something like that that can look into it by means of pass-through laws and sort of overcome all of this bad redominance?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lauren?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that the basic answer to that is that we need to look very carefully at both the technical side, which is part of what he's talking about there, and the legal side of how the Internet is going to be controlled and governed.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		And we don't know what the right answers to that really are going to be.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So your websites are to determine these things together.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		To try to start working it out, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you the only ones working on this?
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		No, by no means.
		There's lots of people working on it.
		Part of the reason we're doing this is my partner in PFIR and myself have been involved in the network for so long that our perspective, I think, is pretty useful on a lot of these issues.
		But we're just two of many who are working on these.
		But we hope by bringing a lot of people together from these other organizations, we'll be able to make considerable progress.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you sure have been of great value on this program this morning, and we're way out of time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, my friend, thank you.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		It's been a pleasure.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
dr lauren weinstein ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Lauren Weinstein, you can read more on his website.
		We've got a link on coast2coastam.com.
		Everybody, y'all have a good night, and I'll see you later on this night from the high desert.

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