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Aug. 5, 2006 - Art Bell
02:39:30
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Lauren Weinstein - Internet and Privacy Issues
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From the Southeast Asian capital city of the land of 7,107 islands, the Philippines, I bid you good day, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the case may be, wherever you are in the planet's many, many time zones, all of them covered thoroughly by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
It's great to be here.
I'm Art Bell.
It is my honor.
My privilege to be escorting you through what's going to be a fascinating weekend.
Let me catch you up on a couple of things first.
The item on, actually there are a couple items on the website for your attention.
One of course is my web picture, my little weekend web picture and somebody sent that to me and I thought, I sat and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed.
That is a billboard.
Never underestimate a woman scorned.
And you may have to squint a little bit to read it, but it's worth a squint.
Believe me.
You know, it's a little bit of a small format, of course, there, but my God, that's funny.
So, go to coasttocoastam.com and check it out.
It's really absolutely a riot.
All right, that's one item.
Another item is we're having a free weekend.
A free Streamlink weekend.
Now what that means is between now and Monday at 6 o'clock in the morning Pacific Time, you can listen to the program for free on Streamlink.
Now that is a pretty doggone good deal.
And as a matter of fact, Aaron is listening in the other room on Streamlink right now.
I applied for the free, you know, I should be, I'm sure that They could arrange to have me get into Streamlink most of the time, but we've used other methods, so... This weekend, she's actually listening to Streamlink, courtesy of the free Streamlink Weekend.
Again, between now and six o'clock in the morning, time on Monday, it's all free, so jump on it.
Now, I think all they actually do is ask for your name and your email address, so they can probably send you a promo or something like that.
Also, I want you to take a look on the website.
Somebody during the week sent me a UFO clip that I found absolutely irresistible.
You will see in this clip a number of Russian jet aircraft chasing a cylindrical object.
There's a narration with it, so be sure you turn up the sound.
And I thought that was pretty good stuff.
It doesn't look fake, does not look in any way I don't know.
You can give me your own feedback and let me know what you think, but this cylindrical object pulled ahead of the supersonic fighters just like that.
You tell me what you think.
Let's look briefly at the generally depressing world news.
Oh no, there is one other item before we sink into the depression of the world news, and that is I have a cold.
Now, if you hear me stuffed up a little bit, that's because indeed I have a cold.
I have now had the flu twice, and let's see, two colds.
So it is my theory that coming here to Southeast Asia, I have encountered an entirely new batch of viruses and I have two choices.
One is to remain away from any possible exposure to these viruses.
In other words, stay home.
Or the other is to simply go out and allow them to challenge my immune system until I have virtually, from an immune system point of view, become a Filipino.
So that's what I'm doing.
I shall suffer through them.
All right, looking at the world, never pleasant.
Israel, of course, Israel and Hezbollah, sharply, both of them, intensified fighting Saturday with airstrikes, rocket attacks, brutal ground fighting.
An apparent bid to inflict maximum mutual damage, even as the U.S.
and France agreed.
How unusual is that, the U.S.
and France agreeing on anything?
A draft U.N.
resolution calling for the halt to the violence.
Now, even if they get the draft U.N.
Resolution.
The odds of the fighting stopping until Israel feels like it's done enough are very small, in my opinion.
But you never know.
Now this will touch on tonight's subject.
Two teens accused of theft of Virginia computer.
Two teenagers were arrested Saturday in the theft of a laptop and a hard drive containing some sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
The equipment was stolen May 3rd during a burglary at the Maryland home of a Veterans Affairs employee.
The laptop and hard drive were turned into the FBI June 28th by an unidentified person
in response to a, is that a $50,000, yeah, $50,000 reward offer.
The nation's governors are closing ranks in opposition to a proposal in Congress that
would let the President take control of the nation's National Guard in emergencies without
any consent of the governors.
Now, I wonder how you feel about that.
In other words, the governors don't have to... Traditionally, it's governors that have called out the National Guard in any given state.
The nation's governors don't like this idea at all.
The idea spurred by all the destruction and chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina's landfall in Louisiana Mississippi is part of a House-based version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
It has not yet been agreed to by the Senate.
Al-Qaeda's number two leader said in a new videotape aired Saturday that an Egyptian militant group has joined the terror network.
It was the first time that Al-Qaeda has announced a branch in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation.
And in Cuba, despite the celebrations going on down in Florida, Cuban officials are saying Saturday that Fidel Castro was steadily recovering from surgery and that the government was still preparing for its worst-case scenario, an attack by government opponents taking advantage of the leader's health crisis.
All right, in a moment we will explore the rest of the news.
Now, let me review a little bit of last week.
As you know, last week we had a bombshell, and Dr. Stephen Greer came on and affirmed all that had been quoted of him with regard to the fact that SETI signals had been received And then, by the way, there was an article, many of you may have seen it.
It was run by the Register in England, entitled, SETI Urged to Fess Up Over Alien Signals.
And then a cute little mother load, or just load.
Alien hunters today pounded the SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute here with emails, phone calls, and such following claims made This weekend, the organization has covered up the detection of signals from space.
Allegations of a SETI cover-up were made last night on the fringe-friendly Coast to Coast radio program hosted by Art Bell.
During the broadcast, professional SETI watcher Stephen Greer, CEO of Space Energy Access Systems, claimed that insiders told him that SETI discovered a high concentration of signals from space, And that another organization stepped in to block those signals and it goes on and on.
I think it's posted on the website so you can see it for yourself.
And I will not burden you with reciting all of Dr. Greer's comments, the comments that were made.
I understand that Seth Shostak appeared with George on the night following.
In order to say, no.
Well, I mean, what would you expect Seth to say?
And frankly, Seth is a very honest guy, and I'm sure, I'm pretty sure, that Seth was telling the truth from his point of view.
In other words, if there was some truth to this, do I think Seth would know they had been received?
And the answer is not necessarily.
Let me read to you a little bit from a brand new article in the New Scientist.
It's called Space.
How to tell Earthlings that Martian life is here.
Here's the way it begins.
A plan should be formulated for how to tell the public if signs of Martian life are found by future missions to the Red Planet, say scientists from NASA and the SETI Institute.
Otherwise, incorrect information could be leaked to the public before studies on the potential life could be completed.
Now, there's more to the story, but I'd like to bore in a little bit, if you wouldn't mind, on exactly this part.
Once again, a plan should be formulated for how to tell the public if signs of Martian life are found by future missions to the Red Planet, say scientists from NASA and SETI.
Otherwise, incorrect information could be leaked to the public before studies on the potential life could be completed.
Now, let's think about that a little bit, shall we?
Let's just consider that for a moment, all right?
What do they mean, leaked?
My understanding was that, my goodness, if they got signals from space, there would be no delay in our finding out, right?
The word would be out everywhere!
But, this would seem to indicate otherwise, that it could be leaked.
So...
Anyway, let me give you some more of this story and then I'll sort of reflect on that again.
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers that continue, by the way, to explore Mars are not designed to search for life.
But if a sample return mission is ever sent to Mars, scientists could test for it in the rocks brought back to Earth.
In 1996, News of Possible Signs of Life, In a Martian meteorite, remember that, called ALH84001, leaked out ahead of a press conference that had been scheduled by NASA.
This was partly because a high-ranking White House official told a prostitute, that's right, a prostitute, told a prostitute about the meteorite.
NASA had to scramble to reschedule its press conference to an earlier date to satisfy the growing demand for information from the press and the public.
The bottom line is, unless somebody had told their bed partner what was going on at NASA, we would not have known.
Now here they mention both NASA and the SETI Institute, and they worry about leaked information ahead of when we, the public, would have been told.
Now doesn't that tell us that, look here, American public, if signals are received, would we be immediately told?
I think the answer clearly is outlined here as no.
Not a chance!
It's actually been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment.
His hope, of course, to hear a deliberate signal guided into space by intelligent beings rather than the natural noisy dance of hot electrons.
Since then, SETI has expanded its search space, bettered its equipment, of course, and refined strategies, but the bottom line still hasn't budged.
No confirmed chatter from the cosmos.
Some people mistakenly confuse a long search with a thorough search.
And they figure that the lack of a steady detection indicates that we're alone in the galaxy.
This, however, is total nonsense.
The number of star systems we've carefully examined thus far is about a thousand.
That is a trifling sample compared with the several hundred billion suns that stud the Milky Way, and of very little statistical significance in fact.
It's rather comparable to initiating a quest for, let's say, Americans who play the oboe.
But considering the search, meaningful after only interrogating two people.
So, I don't know.
With reference to whether they have contacted us, whether we have received signals, or in fact, whether they are actually here right now, my only...
The only direction I can give you is it's awfully damned easy to be a debunker until you have seen for yourself, as you know I have seen.
I had a heart-stopping moment, indeed, as a craft flew directly over me.
It defied gravity.
It obviously was not from here.
We have no technology that could have achieved what I saw.
And so I know.
I guess it makes it easy for me.
It's kind of like religion.
Those who have experienced, those who know, have no problem believing because they simply know.
Well, with respect to these craft and the fact that we have indeed been visited, I know.
I don't know, it may put me in a position where it's almost tough to do this program, because I do know somebody else who might know would be one of our astronauts.
There was quite a bit of a buzz, I understand, this last week about exactly that.
Now, you may recall when Neil Armstrong took that famous tentative step onto another world, our moon.
Guess what?
The magnetic tapes that hold a high-resolution image of all that seem to be missing.
The first moonwalk beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Park's famous dish, while they've gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland.
That's right, missing.
A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes might disintegrate to dust before they can be found.
Now, it's not widely known that Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was in fact a high quality transmission.
Bet you didn't know that, did you?
Far sharper than the rather blurry vision relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.
Now, that's got me wondering too.
Why Why, oh why, would we of all these years received that blurry vision which has been replayed endlessly, and endlessly, and we never received the sharp stuff?
Anybody else wonder about that?
Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Serkinson, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parks for now a decade.
He said, quote, we're working on the assumption they still exist.
Your guess is as good as mine as to where they are.
Mr. Sarkison began researching the role of parks in Apollo 11's mission in 1997 before the movie The Dish was made.
However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, lo and behold, they could not be found.
People, he says, quoting, may have thought that we've got the tapes of the moonwalk and so we don't need these, said the scientist.
If they can be found, he proposes making digitized copies to treat the world to a very, very different view of history.
Now, once again, I don't mean to be overly skeptical and overly conspiratorial, even though that's the sort of thing that we dish out here at Coast to Coast AM, but my goodness, They had high-resolution images of Neil Armstrong going down the ladder, taking that one big step for mankind.
And all these years they didn't tell us about it.
They didn't even tell us about it, much less show us.
And then we have the story about NASA and SETI being concerned about a leak.
Should Mars suddenly yield life?
You know, so...
Am I being too much of a skeptic?
Too much of a... Is that the right word?
Skeptic is not the right word.
What am I being?
Somebody help me out here.
What am I being?
Stubborn?
I don't know.
But frankly, I honestly believe that if we had detected signals from space, we would not be told.
Sorry, Seth.
As you know, during the opportunities that I've had to interview Seth Shostak, he's a wonderful, straight-on, very friendly guy.
But I have again and again and again challenged him and asked him whether we would really know.
His response has always been a very straightforward, oh, you know, it would flash around the internet, we'd know.
Well, short of somebody soliciting a prostitute, getting her in bed, and then telling her the secret, I guess we wouldn't.
Because apparently they do have Plans in place to keep it secret from the public until they figured out just how to spin the story, I suppose.
How to tell us?
Oh, by the way, the Big Bang was always thought to have been about 13.7 billion years ago.
13.7 billion.
Guess what?
Now the Big Bang has been pushed back by not a little.
But a lot.
Two billion years.
They now think that Big Bang occurred 15.8 billion years ago, not 13.7.
Our universe, in fact, may be 15% larger and older than we thought according to new measurements of the distance to a nearby galaxy.
Researchers led by a scientist at Carnegie Institute of Washington used data from telescopes including, by the way, the 10 meter Keck 2 telescope in Hawaii to measure the distance to a pair of stars In the Triangulum Galaxy, and when they did, lo and behold, they found out that the universe might be two billion years older than we had previously thought.
We get an awful lot of stories like that.
Science previously thinks one thing or another and now realizes that, lo and behold, it's two billion years older than we thought.
All right, coming up in a moment, we're going to do open lines, so listen carefully for the phone numbers.
Pick one of them.
And that, my friend, is your doorway to talking on Coast to Coast AM from Manila in the Philippines.
Hey, good afternoon!
I'm Art Bell.
Well, here's one.
Christine in Sacramento says, Art, you are suspect.
The word is suspect.
No, I don't think so.
Actually, I'm cynical.
I think cynical is the right word.
I have seen so many stories now that turn out to be inaccurate or things that we have been told are so, just turn out to be not so, whether they're scientific or political.
In other words, let's put it this way, we're lied to a lot.
How about that?
With regard to whether we've been visited by others or we've received signals from others,
yes, I am cynical and cynical me will be back in just a moment.
At the top of this hour we're going to have Howard, Lauren rather, Weinstein here and
Howard Bloom will be tomorrow night.
Lauren Weinstein is a very interesting guy.
It's going to be all about the net.
Now, I'm curious, how much do you depend on the net?
I depend incredibly on the net.
I mean, it is being here in the Philippines, as I am in Southeast Asia.
I've got a very good net connection and it is my lifeline to the rest of the world.
A lot of people have wondered about how I do the program from here, how I answer telephones from here.
Well, I use a very special private connection between here and the network and displayed in front of me, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 telephone lines waiting to be answered.
And I can simply push a button, answer a line, hang up, put it on hold, do as I wish, all of this.
Through the magic of the Internet.
And that's only the beginning.
I depend on the Internet for nearly all the communications that I have back to the United States.
And of course it all occurs at the speed of light.
So how much do I depend on the Internet?
I can't even begin to describe.
Google.
We have the Philippine version of Google here.
It's really the same Google.
And whenever I want to know something, I simply stroll in and ask Google.
I don't know what that's done to encyclopedia salespeople, but I haven't seen them knocking on the door of late.
How about you?
Incidentally, just before we go to the lines, Bob Bigelow, Robert Bigelow, You know the little bumper that was just played, right, with the phone numbers?
The one that says, wanna take a ride with Ross?
Well, that comes, of course, from the movie Contact.
Bob Bigelow, even prior to his latest success, has always reminded me of the old man in contact.
You remember the fellow who was up in the Russian space station and said to Jodie Foster, want to take a ride?
You know, revealing there was a second machine that could be used to manipulate her through wormholes into whatever came next.
Bob Bigelow has always reminded me of that man and now of course he has successfully launched a spacecraft which is in orbit and will soon result after a few more launches.
In a hotel in space.
So Bob Bigelow, who very, very, very rarely makes appearances on this or any other program, I might add, is going to appear here next weekend for at least an hour.
So I thought you would be interested in that.
Bearing that in mind, let us go to the phones and say, wild card line, top of the morning, you are on the air.
Good morning, Mr. Bill.
This is Ray from Texas.
Hey, Ray.
How are you this evening?
I'm just fine.
Other than the cold and the flu and the assault of Southeast Asia.
Yes.
Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about that black hole that things seem to fall into, like the Kennedy assassination autopsy and these tapes from the moon.
I was listening to that gentleman who... Oh, and let's not forget, all the records of Roswell, they mysteriously disappeared.
It was a darndest thing.
Oh yeah, in 1988 when they closed Project Blue Book, and the scientist who was in charge of that came out and debunked the entire results of Project Blue Book, he suddenly kind of stopped talking too, when they said, well, there's no proof and we forget it.
See, you sound like a cynical person.
Yeah, when you said, what is the word, I knew immediately what it was.
It was cynical because I am.
You know, I'm healthfully cynical because I know how they are.
It really honestly is healthy to be cynical.
How can you not be?
If you really follow the news, then again, you know, Seth Shostak is a wonderful guy and honestly, I think he told us what he believes to be the truth.
But do I honestly think we would be told immediately if signals were coming from elsewhere or we had visitors from elsewhere?
Not a chance, sir.
We don't get told immediately anything.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, apparently so, yes.
They have major programs just to make sure we don't find out, like you say.
If it wasn't for a prostitute, we wouldn't have found out about the Mars rock.
Well, apparently so, yes.
You know, I mean, they're so afraid of leaks.
They have people that do nothing all day long but handle leaks.
There were the plumbers, you know, that brought down an entire presidency.
That's right.
I mean, goodness.
I'm 54, you know, I've been around a little bit.
And the scientists can't even agree with each other.
Well, you're right, again, that's part of what it takes.
As you get a little bit older, and you've seen more and more and more of this come down the pike, then you become, if you have half a brain in your head, naturally cynical.
Well, you can't avoid it.
I mean, I'm a Vietnam veteran, too, and like, yeah, sure, you know.
Are you still there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
Yeah, I know.
Me too.
I'm a Vietnam vet as well.
That was the start of it, you know?
You know, you really are, I think, correct.
I've given this a lot of thought and it really did begin about then with body counts.
Yeah.
How could we kill out like 110% of the entire North Vietnamese nation?
And still have to evacuate at the last moment.
Yeah, we're leaving.
You guys win.
You have a good morning, sir.
I really appreciate your call.
Yes, I enjoyed it.
Take care.
Okay, take care.
He's exactly right, and the correct word really is cynical.
Suspicious, yes, but really cynical.
Let's go east of the Rockies and say, yo, you're on the air.
Hello?
Yeah, Ark?
Yes, yes, sir.
I'm sorry, this is WTAQ 1360 Green Bay.
Okay, welcome to the program.
I just wanted to comment on the issue of you being a teacher of the radio.
Actually, what I do is I call you the professor of all radio.
I really appreciate you.
I've been a 15-year loyal member.
That's a long time, isn't it?
Yes, sir, it is.
And I tell you right now, without you, I don't think I'd be here.
However, I have one issue to say.
We have all this war of destruction talking all the time.
And I wanted to say, can we have a war of healing?
A war of healing?
It's kind of like news, sir.
We don't get good news.
We don't have wars of healing.
We have wars of destruction.
I understand the wish, and I certainly appreciate the compliment.
Yes, I've been around a long time now.
It's been a lot of years on the air.
I'm not exactly sure.
Perhaps one of you can do a little research out there, but how many radio personalities have had, you know, like a 20-year run?
I think it's been about that for me, about 20 years, something like that.
I know there are certainly some, but I think they can probably be counted on about two hands at the most.
Paul Harvey comes to mind immediately, of course.
He's been going quite some bit longer than I have.
But aside from that, who else?
Has had the sort of lucky, continuous rain that I've had.
Who else?
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Yes, hello Mr. Bell.
Hello.
This is Jamie out of station KMED in Medford, Oregon.
Yes, sir.
Okay, now I understand you're going to have a gentleman at the top of the hour.
Right now it's approaching 11 o'clock here.
And I would like to put a little bug in your ear and ask the gentleman regarding censorship of the Internet.
It's been tried here in America and for some reason it's been dropped because I don't believe it's possible.
I would have to take issue with you.
Indeed it is possible.
The Internet is censored here in the Philippines.
How about that?
Well, I understand that through Bill Gates and his relationship with China that it also has been quote-unquote censored.
There are ways around that, Mr. Bell.
Oh, I know there are.
And trust me, I will ask for you.
When I say censored, it's not censored with regard to political content.
But the Philippines is a nation of about 87% plus Catholics.
And that drives a very great deal over here.
In the United States, we have religion.
uh... separated from government uh... in the philippines it is not so religion is mixed up very much in government now that's not all bad as a matter of fact something that i want to talk to you about I constantly get a million questions about the Philippines and one of the reasons I think that I love this country so much is because the family here in the Philippines, the family is as strong as it ever was in America.
If some of you a little longer in the tooth can recall back to the 50s or even perhaps the 40s or earlier, You'll recall that the family unit was very, very strong in America.
That, of course, has now all changed.
Here in the Philippines, that has not changed.
And the family unit here is as strong or stronger than it ever was at the very best in America.
So that's part of what has changed in America, is that we no longer Have the cohesive kind of family unit that we once had.
But again, circling back to the reason for all of this, the internet, there is a little bit of censorship that goes on here.
And I don't think they allow pornography in.
I don't think they allow certain other subjects that would have objection from people of a religious persuasion in.
Other than that though, political things are not censored, nothing of that sort, which I would consider to be very serious.
So, there you have it.
It can occur.
How it occurs, how it's done, I have no idea.
That there are ways around it, I have no doubt.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
This is Rick from the most historic city in America, Hampton, Virginia.
How you doing, buddy?
I'm doing fine.
I want to say congratulations to you.
I have a fiancé who is Filipino.
She's still over there in Bulacan province.
I see.
Congratulations on meeting the second prettiest girl in the Philippines.
Thank you.
A question that I have, and this will probably get Hoagland's dandruff up a little bit, was in the past we have launched approximately eight to ten probes to Mars, correct?
That's probably about right.
And about three of them got there?
Mm-hmm.
And I was wondering if These other ones were not actually lost, but I've actually found their mission and are circling above giving information now.
As of some projects, like I'm sure you know of Corona and Glomar Explorer, and even when Ballard found the Titanic, he was looking for the Scorpion.
So I'm just wondering if we have some extra eyes around here that nobody knows about except for the chosen few.
I don't know.
That's one possibility.
Another is that there actually is intelligent life of some sort on Mars, and they really don't want these probes continually peppering their planet.
And as a matter of fact, there was one Russian probe that actually took a picture of something absolutely monstrous just before it was completely blown to bits.
And if you search around a little bit, you can find a picture of that on the web.
I would call that somewhat suspicious.
Just a little bit.
And also, a few years back, you had a guest who claimed to have invented a power source, home power source, that was about the size of a central air conditioning unit, but was being threatened.
Have you ever done any follow-up on this gentleman, or has he just disappeared into the night?
Okay, the answer to that is that he has pretty much disappeared into the night.
Now that has occurred to almost everybody who has made claims of power sources of this sort.
To the great majority of these people, I would say they probably didn't really have it in the first place.
In other words, they were yanking on our legs.
However, not all of them.
And I think that there are some things that have been invented that simply are ahead of their time.
And yes, I do believe that they have been either suppressed or many times purchased.
And you know, the person goes away to live comfortably on a Caribbean island somewhere.
And then they're put up on the shelf.
So the answer is, I'm sure the oil companies from time to time have, let's see how can I put this, acted to protect their investment.
Is that fair?
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi Art, welcome back.
Why, thank you.
And I agree with you completely regarding Seth and Setti.
I'm wondering, has he ever addressed STS-48 in that rather fascinating scenario where the object suddenly does whatever it was, a 90 degree turn?
Yes, I brought that up, sir.
I brought it up with Seth, and his comments at the time were, I'm going to have to take a look at that.
With regard to that and other things of that sort, he generally says, well, I'm going to have to do a little research.
Now, again, in fairness to Seth, he's a really nice guy and I really think that he's being honest with us because I don't think he knows.
But does he go out of his way to study whether we might have already been visited or whether we might already have received signals?
I don't think so, based on his answers.
Right.
Well, then there was Buzz Aldrin.
George played that piece one night, and Buzz was apparently interviewed by the BBC back in the early 90s.
Yes.
Very, very fascinating remarks regarding some UFO.
I did not hear the program, however, I have the story here, and so I'm rather curious myself, sir.
Can you tell me, how did Buzz answer that question?
In the documentary with the BBC?
No, no, no.
I have the documentary right in front of me, at least what was said.
What I'm asking is when Buzz was on the program with George, how did he answer the documentary?
Did he just say they had it wrong or what did he say?
Yeah, essentially he dismissed it as so much He said that he had to take someone to court and sue them for disinformation.
But before I forget, Art, I used to be like you.
I used to contract colds and flus the year round.
And then I discovered spices.
And I admonish you to start using things like madras curry powder, cinnamon, ginger, Nutmeg, because those are really medicinal substances.
And art, if you enjoy Star Trek technology.
George interviewed a British guy who described a technology called the Skinar.
And let me tell you, that is one immensely therapeutic healing instrument.
Alright, well I very much appreciate the advice and I promise you I will look into it because I'm certainly very, very tired of getting these colds and flu.
My feeling again was that, look, there are all kinds of different viruses here in the Philippines.
At home in Nevada, of course, I didn't get out a lot, so I was not exposed to very much.
Then I got over here and suddenly I was exposed to everything.
So, either I've got to stay home pretty much here, or I go out and I get these viruses and my immune system becomes, well, hardy and resistant to them.
Yes, I've got the Buzz Aldrin business here and it's kind of hard to imagine that he completely denied all of it.
I mean, obviously they saw something.
Something.
But it says here they were not going to come back and report an unidentified flying object.
I don't know.
All of the astronauts are fascinating people.
As you know, I've interviewed quite a number of them.
Quite a number of them have had difficulties in their life of one sort or another.
I guess as we all have.
But perhaps a disproportionate number of difficulties in their life.
And I guess it does bring up the topic Could they be hiding something?
Could they have seen something while they were in space and or walking on the moon that they cannot or will not, I suspect cannot, talk about?
Hmm?
I don't know.
I'm Art Bell and we'll be right back.
This, of course, is Coast to Coast AM coming to you from Manila in the Philippines.
7107 islands strong.
Well, hi there, in a manner of speaking.
We're doing time travel right now.
As I speak to you, it's a little bit after 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday afternoon here in the Philippines.
Coming up in a moment, Loren Weinstein.
He's one of the old men, old men of the Internet.
Loren has been involved with the development of the Net for decades now.
He began his involvement in the early 70s at the first site of the Internet's ancestor, the Defense Department's And I always get this wrong.
I believe it's Harpinet.
I think it's Arbinet.
He created and moderates the Privacy Forum, which was founded more than 12 years ago and co-founded PFIR, or People for Internet Responsibility.
Loren 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, including, of course, This one.
And one of the very first questions I'm going to have for Lauren, and it is a fascinating one brought up by a caller a little while ago, is the issue of censorship.
We have it here in the Philippines, and it's not all that bad, frankly.
in a moment, Loren Weinstein.
David in Hawthorne, California said, about what Boz said in the interview with George, he
changed the subject when answering to a news story about him seeing
LGM on the surface to which he brought the person responsible to court.
He didn't actually deny any UFO sighting.
Well, let me hold Lauren for just one moment.
I've got some of the copy here.
Which claims that Buzz Aldrin did indeed claim that Apollo 11 saw UFOs.
Now maybe a UFO, calling it a UFO, is different than saying he saw an alien or he saw an alien spaceship or something like that.
But basically, folks, I've got the word-for-word stuff with Mission Control here and they obviously did see something.
Dr. David Baker, Apollo 11 senior scientist, said NASA knew very little about the subject.
Quoting here, the object reported by the Apollo 11 crew was obviously an unidentified flying object, but such objects were not uncommon.
And the history of even Earth-orbiting spaceflights going back over the previous years indicated that several crews actually had seen objects.
The narrator said, despite having a clear view of the UFO, the crew were wary of reporting it to Mission Control.
Aldrin quoting here, from what I'm reading, now obviously the three of us were not going to blurt out, hey Houston, we've got something moving alongside of us and we have no idea what it is.
Can you tell us what it is?
We weren't about to do that because we know those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and who knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back or something because of aliens or whatever the reason is.
So we didn't do that.
But we did decide we'd just cautiously ask Houston, how far away was the S-IVB?
The narrator goes on, unaware of the drama unfolding in space, Mission Control radioed the position back to Apollo 11.
Mission Control, Apollo 11, Houston, the S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now.
Over.
Aldrin, and a few moments later, Why they came back and said something like it was 6,000 miles away because of the maneuver.
So we really didn't think we were looking at something that far away.
So we decided that after a while of watching it, it was time to go to sleep and not talk about it anymore, at least until we came back and went through a debriefing.
So something or another was seen.
Just to clear that, if that clears it up.
Lauren Weinstein, welcome to the program.
Greetings Art and Manoa.
Yeah, all the way to Manila.
Is it or is it not an amazing world when you can do this all the way from the Philippines to the U.S.
and then the world?
It is amazing.
Is it harder to get into the mood for a late night radio program when it's the middle of the afternoon there?
It is not.
I've sort of put myself in the routine of doing that and I get up early enough to sort of be prepared and awake and ready.
No, it's not.
The miracle of ISDN here.
Well, that and a really good window shade, and I darken it down a little in here, and so I, you know, I create my own mood, Lauren.
Definitely the right way to do it when we have the facilities.
All right, let's talk about the Internet.
A caller in the first hour said, please, please ask Lauren about censorship now.
Censorship?
Yeah, on the Internet.
Now, it's interesting, Lauren.
I'm here in the Philippines, and I can tell you there is censorship here.
I didn't hear the last part of your sentence.
There was a loud bleep that covered it just now.
I know better than that.
Listen, there is censorship here.
It's nothing that I object to.
They remove the pornography.
How they do that, I have no idea, but they do.
And I think it's a good thing.
I don't think pornography belongs on the Internet.
I know that's going to raise a lot of freedom of expression and speech issues, but I don't particularly think it belongs there.
This is a Catholic country, about 87 percent, Lauren.
And so the religious people in this country, being such a large percentage, have a big influence on the government.
In fact, a very direct influence.
And so that kind of thing is censored here.
How they manage to do that, I don't know.
Maybe you can tell me.
How do they do it?
Well, it depends on the particular venue we're talking about, but a more interesting question is how do you define it?
I mean, you say Pornography is censored, but how do we define pornography?
Well, I believe that a wise Supreme Court Justice said there really is no defining it, however he knew it when he saw it.
Right, yeah, but of course in this country, which was founded on the concept specifically of not having a state religion or having too much influence by religion, at least ostensibly, We see all the time that people get into different arguments about what's appropriate and what's not, and what's pornography and what's not.
To some people, it's really obvious.
To other people, it's information about birth control.
So it can get very, very touchy when you start trying to impose that.
There have certainly been attempts in this country, the Child Online Protection Act, which has been bouncing back and forth.
The courts are specifically related to the Internet.
Attempts to define things in terms of what's objectionable or what's harmful, but even that's very difficult to do So I guess I guess it sort of amounts to in different societies and different cultures in different countries There can be different ways of dealing with this that may work fine in the Philippines I think it would be more problematic here.
We've certainly seen some of the problems in China where they have censorship that is more political censorship as well and And one of the problems with censorship that comes up a lot is that you might start with something that maybe a lot of people agree on, like extreme pornography.
But then if that seems to work, you say, well, you know, maybe we can simplify the political process, too, by doing a bit of censorship there.
So it can easily kind of spin out of control.
And I think that's why a lot of people get very concerned.
It's that slippery slope.
It's a classic phrase, but it does apply.
Intellectually, I absolutely agree that America includes freedom of speech, and freedom of speech includes the depiction, for example, of sexual activity between consenting adults.
I really intellectually agree with that.
However, after spending a period of time here in the Philippines, I can tell you this, the family unit here is extremely, extremely cohesive.
That is still very much in place.
It'd be like America in the 50s or even back to the 40s.
And part of the reason that the family is still very cohesive is because it's driven By the large Catholic population here, and yes, they do censor that sort of thing.
So, I don't know, I have very much of two minds about it.
On the one hand, intellectually, I agree with the freedom we have in the U.S., but on the other hand, I look at the wonderful family unit When you have a homogeneous society where there isn't a lot of diversity in some respects, it makes things a lot easier.
I mean, it really does.
would amaze you so when you have a homo homo homogenous society where there
isn't a lot of diversity in some respects it makes things a lot easier I
mean it really does but that's not necessarily always a good thing yeah but
that's not the Philippines It's not that way in the sense the Japanese are, for example.
The Philippines is very much a, what's the right word?
It's driven by individual initiative and all the things that we love in America.
All of that is in place.
And again, the Japanese would be as you describe, but not the Philippines.
So, this country is kind of in the middle.
Anyway, what I'm really wondering, Lauren, is how do they do it?
Well, what are we talking about?
Television?
Radio?
Internet?
The Internet.
How do they censor, for example, the Internet so that if you go after something that is not legal or is not moral, somehow or another, you don't get it.
Yeah, usually the way that's done, certainly the way it's done in China, for example, is by having the network very hierarchically controlled.
You have what amount of choke points in the network that all the traffic has to go through, and those choke points are heavily monitored, either by software or people or combinations of the two, and then decisions have to be made about Well, what is forbidden and then what do you do when someone accesses something that's forbidden?
Do you just block it?
Do you note the fact that they tried to access it and then deal with those people later and in some punitive way?
You know, there's all kinds of different ways to handle this.
Usually there's a lot of Surveillance involved, as you would imagine.
Well, I almost can't imagine, Loren.
In other words, there's so much on the Internet.
If it requires a human decision about whether or not to block any given thing, that would be a full-time job for half a country full of people.
In some situations, there are thousands and thousands of people engaged in doing that.
But that's usually in addition to automated systems.
Now, having said that, I think you would find that on closer inspection, the level of censorship that appears to be there is not as watertight as it might appear at first glance.
And there are probably lots of ways that people who want to get past the censorship walls have found to do it.
Usually it's just a matter of knowing the right technique or knowing the right person or trying hard enough.
So it may look very clean on the surface, but there's probably a lot going on if you went to the right place or asked the right person.
So, you know, it becomes the kind of situation where different individuals are going to have to look at it and make a decision as to whether this is good for them.
In a country like that, where you have such a gigantic majority that's one religion, of course, it's going to make a lot of that decision-making much simpler from the government standpoint.
So it is possible, but it takes a hell of a lot of work and a hell of a lot of people to do it.
And it will always be a moving target, too, because there will always be ways around it.
I mean, when you think about it, it's obvious because you can take a photograph that appears to be of a beautiful country scene with cows and the sun shining and all that, and hidden within that picture there could be pornography.
It's very difficult to find ways to detect all the different ways that information can be hidden, or disguised, or how sites can be changed.
Sites can very quickly change on the internet.
So unless you're going to restrict people in a very draconian way, like to say you can only access official government sites, right?
If you do something like that, then you have real control.
But if you're going to let people Get to CNN or get to university sites or other sites outside the country or bloggers or things like that.
There's going to be leakage of material through.
That's just in the nature of the technology.
Well, I'm sure you're correct.
But I've taken a look at it and it is, I guess it is what it is here.
In America, I take it you're against any sort of censorship on the net and you probably further feel that even if it was there, you know, there'd be enough ways around it so it's not worth doing.
Would that be your point of view?
Well, I'd say that, again, you have to define censorship.
There's some material that probably needs to be controlled.
I mean, we don't want people doing the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, right?
On the other hand, you do have the problem of deciding who's going to make those decisions, who's going to be in control, and that's a very big issue right now.
I mean, people don't realize one of the things that a lot of people Don't realize there's a battle going on right now over who's going to control the internet in terms of whether it's going to be the phone companies and the cable companies, whether it's going to be the people who are providing internet services.
Alright, well we'll get to that, and that's I know a very, very large issue, but I mean if you go to some sort of pornographic site in America, you will get inevitably a little page that will pop up and say, do you warranty that you're 18 years of age?
Well, obviously any 11 or 12 year old is going to go, of course I do, click, and they're going to move on.
It looks silly, doesn't it?
I know.
Well, it is silly.
It is silly, and I think that our children should be protected from this sort of thing.
Don't you?
I think that children need to be protected.
I think the question is how do we do it?
How do we do it without bringing everything down to the lowest common denominator where everything that's on the internet is appropriate for children?
Very tough problem.
Is there a way to do it?
There are ways to accomplish some of it, but a lot of it is not going to be solved by technology.
In other words, you end up back with that problem that if parents treat the Internet as a babysitter, like they used to treat, and I guess in many cases still treat, television as a babysitter, you're going to be faced with these kinds of issues, because there's no magic technological bullet to solve these problems, because there will always be ways to get around them.
I hate to say responsibility, and I ask people for internet responsibility, but the word responsibility really does apply.
And it's very easy to say, well, we'll just write this software or do this with this server and that'll solve it.
But that isn't going to be the solution.
Technology is part of the way we have to deal with these things.
But by itself, it can never be the total solution.
And we tend to try to take the shortcuts.
And technology is often seen as the shortest route.
And so we end up with incomplete solutions and often more problems.
How, I depend on the Internet for, oh my God, I don't know how I would function without it.
Of course, I'm a technologically driven kind of person and I sit here and I answer phones using the Internet and get information and receive messages and do all kinds of things on the Internet and I would be simply lost without it.
So, Lauren, how safe is the Internet?
In other words, Is it always going to be there for me or is the internet in some, could it suddenly disappear overnight?
Could something whack the internet and it would suddenly be gone?
It shouldn't happen overnight.
The whole basis of the internet is that it's supposed to be distributed sufficiently that it's not vulnerable to catastrophic collapse.
That's part of its evolution from the ARPANET.
And you did get that right, by the way.
The original defense arm of ARPANET, which was a project that was designed to find a way to get computer networks to survive nuclear wars, where you certainly have a problem with sites going up in mushroom clouds.
So that evolved into the Internet.
Points of vulnerability in the internet that are of concern, particularly relating to the way domain names are translated.
It's called the domain name servers.
That's done by fewer computers than one might imagine, and if those things go down, technically the network is still up, but most people don't think in terms of addresses like 126.32.41.9.
But, having said that, There's been a lot of work done at really making the network as robust as possible.
And I don't think we have to worry too much about technological failures as much as we do political and legislative failures that could result in changes in the Internet over time that would make it much less functional than it is now.
And that could be just as bad from your standpoint.
In other words, for example, you could still be connected to your provider, but you could put an address in, I think you're suggesting, and short of knowing the actual IP address to go directly to, even though you were connected to the Internet, you would not go anywhere, is that correct?
Well, the issue really is what addresses will you be allowed to go to?
That's sort of the question we're heading toward, I think.
I'm sure.
Lauren, I'll hold tight.
We're here at the bottom of the hour from Manila in the Philippines, where yes, some things are not allowed.
We could argue about the advocacy of doing that.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
Certainly is, from Manila in the Philippines.
Hi everybody.
Brian in Las Vegas, near my old home.
Actually, still my home.
Censorship, says Brian, is bad.
The problem is, hackers and idiots who strike innocent people, children, are not going to be hurt by looking at nude pictures.
Grow up, Art!
You're showing your age.
Porn never hurt anyone on the internet.
Censorship is the killer.
Brian, I suppose you might be right.
I do agree, Brian, that nude pictures never hurt anybody, but if you look at some of the content of some of the porn that's on the internet, that does hurt people.
It's not only degrading, But I think it does hurt people and it gives them ideas and it sends them, some of it anyway, in directions that are hurtful and harmful.
And that's particularly the case with children.
I simply have no idea how you control that.
And I'm not trying to set up a situation where we're looking at America and the Philippines.
But I can tell you that here, the family unit is very much intact.
And that's something that we've lost in America.
There's simply no question about it.
We've lost it in America.
Here it's intact.
Why?
Why is it so much intact here?
I don't have the answer to that question, Brian, but this might be one of the answers.
Now, intellectually, Brian, I completely agree with you.
America is a country where we cherish free speech, even when it offends us.
So intellectually, I absolutely agree with you.
However, in actual practice, when you look at what it has done to a society, Um, I'm not so sure, Brian.
and I'm Art Bell.
Alright, here comes yet another, I think, pretty big question for you, Lauren.
And that is, there are, oh gosh, Lauren, any number of programs on the internet right now that will allow you to Make a telephone call, for example.
Simply put in a number, and if there is a fee, it's a very small fee, and some are free, and you can just, for example, from here in the Philippines, call a number in the United States, as you would on the telephone, but for oh so much less, as the Internet Expands and speeds get better.
We're going to be able to deliver pay-per-view movies on the Internet.
Movies are already, as you well know, moving on the Internet.
And then, of course, there's the problem of music and all the rest of it.
But what I'm getting at, Lauren, is that, obviously, it's going to get to the point where the Internet is so dangerous to a lot of industries around the world that there is going to have to be some sort of tax or control.
And what do you know?
Well, actually, this is already well on its way, but not necessarily in the way you might imagine.
The phone call side of this you were just mentioning is what's called voice-over IP, voice-over internet protocol, and that's things, of course, like Vonage and U.S.
Skype, which is a version that's more computer-to-computer or computer-to-phone rather than using ordinary phones.
All sorts of things like that.
That, by the way, is censored in some countries.
We're talking about censorship.
There are countries where you can't use that because it competes with the country's government-owned telephone system.
No problem here.
I've got Skype and I can use it.
So, you know, that's another kind of form of censorship.
But what's happening, we're talking about music and movies and pay-per-view television movies, all these sorts of things.
This is an area where the The phone companies and the cable companies who are the main way that we get high-speed Internet service or any kind of Internet service in the U.S.
are very, very interested in carving out protection for themselves and to make it as difficult as possible in the long run for competition.
It's necessary to go a little bit back in history for this.
What we need to do is look at why the Internet is the way it is.
And one of the key things about the Internet, and the ARPANET before it, one of the real geniuses in its design, is that the network itself doesn't know a lot about what people are doing on it.
It doesn't really know too much about the details of the applications.
Whether you're using a web browser and looking at a website or listening to some streaming music or whatever you're doing, the network is very busily moving packets of data from place to place.
It isn't doing a lot of interpretation or control or... No, no, no, wait a minute.
I thought that was largely controlled by ports.
Am I incorrect?
Well, ports are sort of, I think ports is addressing more than anything else.
But I'm thinking, I'm talking about the internet itself in terms of the big machine in a way.
Of course, it's a lot, you know, many, many independent machines that are moving information from point A to point B.
And it's real job is to do that as cleanly as possible and without getting in the way.
That is not the telephone company model of doing things.
I want to ask you a question.
When the phone company or cable company comes to you and says, boy, have we got a deal for you, just put yourself in our hands.
You're going to get such wonderful stuff.
Just sign up for us.
Sign up for this bundle.
Let us take care of you.
Where do you usually end up in six months or a year?
Usually, you end up paying a lot more than you'd planned.
And traditionally, a phone company always operated that way.
They'd like to have complete control of everything and charge whatever the market would bear in a restricted environment.
The Internet is the opposite of that.
The Internet's the antithesis of that.
The Internet is a situation where the phone company and the cable company are sort of relegated, when it comes to Internet service, to just passing bits along.
And anyone can set up an application.
That means anyone as big as Google or some kid operating out of a garage who's come up with a brilliant new idea, the entrepreneur for tomorrow who can get on the network just as equally and as easily as anyone else and move as much data as he can pay for his internet connection.
And what's happening right now, and this is under the banner of network neutrality, and this is in Congress right now, there's battles in Congress with the phone companies on one side and actually companies like Google on the other side.
The phone companies want to have a way to charge people who aren't their customers.
Wait a minute, the phone companies want a way to charge people who are not their customers.
I'm sorry, define that for me.
For example, if I take Skype and I call through some portal, I'm ringing a phone in Las Vegas, let us say, how do they possibly control me?
Well, that's what the plan is in the long run, if things go in the direction that things seem to be going.
But how?
Well, you do it by making it, by somehow charging the people that are providing the service on the other end.
I'll use the Google example, okay?
This all kind of started off when the CEO of AT&T, that's the new AT&T, which used to be SBC, and it gets confusing, when he made a remark That just riled up a lot of people where he said, how come people like Google and these other services can use my network for free?
Why aren't they paying me for the right to reach my customers?
Now, of course, Google is paying for its network connections on its side, a lot.
You're paying for the network connection on your side.
You know, people here in this country were paying for DSL or for cable or however we're accessing the Internet.
The kind of thinking that's occurring now, and the kind of pressure that's taking place from AT&T and others, is it's not enough to have the subscribers paying.
They want to have a way to say, well, the service you're talking to should pay to have the right to talk to you, the subscriber.
That's a novel approach.
It's almost like saying, if you call somebody on the phone, they should pay for the right to get your call.
Actually, the phone companies talked about that many years ago.
They actually mused about doing that, but, you know, it didn't work for obvious reasons.
But now you're in a situation where this can work.
And what the network neutrality battle is all about is saying, hey, Congress, do something right for a change.
Make sure we have an even playing field for all of this.
And as you can imagine, the telephone company lobbyists, who have had, like, over a hundred years experience at doing lobbying, versus someone like Google that's only been around eight years, The phone companies basically have the Congress in their back pocket right now.
Now, playing devil's advocate for a moment here, to be fair, there are people who are very knowledgeable about these issues, who are very concerned about trying to pass laws to create this even playing field right now, because they're concerned that once the government gets involved, they're going to muck it up.
And there's historical precedent for this.
Well, you can almost guarantee it.
Of course.
My view of this is that we're past that.
The government's already involved in this.
There's no way to keep them out.
And unless we create the kind of situation now that will prevent the phone companies and the cable companies... Remember, we're talking just about a few gigantic carriers now, because of all the consolidation that we've allowed to occur.
There's so much control of our telecommunications and our access.
People don't realize that in the U.S., We live in like the third world of internet access.
Because in some other countries, where it's handled differently, people can get much faster circuits at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, I'm in one of those countries.
It's very interesting.
People will call the Philippines a third world country, but Lauren, let me tell you something.
The internet distribution here is incredible.
The cell phone industry is far ahead of the U.S.
I think this occurred because the U.S.
did the old copper wire thing all across the country.
The Philippines waited, jumped on the G3 cell phone technology and made that nationwide.
That's part of it, but the other part of it is the way the government interacts.
In this country, we tend to take the charge all the market will bear and put all the power in the hands of a few very large telecommunications firms.
In many other countries, and this is especially true in Asia, where it's just remarkable what's going on, like you said.
It is.
People are getting gigabyte circuits, and in some cases they're not paying a lot more than what we pay for 760 kilobits or something.
I know.
Why, why, why, why?
It's because of policy.
It's because of the concentration that we have allowed to occur in this country.
And it ties right back.
If you don't have a equal playing field for communications on the Internet, there's no incentive to provide these kinds of higher-speed circuits and things.
So this is a situation where if Congress doesn't act, if they take the usual approach and say, well, we'll wait till there's a problem, and then if someone's being treated unfairly, they can file for antitrust protection.
Yes.
Yeah, well, that'll take, you know, until the year 2100 to work its way through.
And by that time, who knows how many Pioneering services and things would have just never seen the light of day because people couldn't afford to pay what amounted to the access tax to pay to companies that they're not even dealing with directly.
And it's not just people at both ends.
If you start creating an environment where everybody has their hands out along the way in the Internet, I mean, people don't realize there's exchange points, there's all kinds of different entities involved in passing information around.
If everybody wants a cut from every packet that goes by, We could end up paying a fortune for Internet service that's of such a low quality compared with much of the rest of the world that we should, that we'll be ashamed of ourselves.
And you would think in a country with the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that we're supposed to have, we would want to have an equal playing field and to avoid this sort of thing.
But if you let the lobbyists have control, the telecom lobbyists, we're going to be back in the same old, same old.
And effectively, you could end up, you ask, will the Internet be destroyed?
It's not going to be destroyed in terms of not working at all, but if the phone companies and the cable companies get their way, we will end up with an Internet that much more resembles Ma Bell of 30 years ago than the kind of future of the Internet we thought we were going to get.
Okay, but look at the other side of it.
I mean, the phone companies are sitting and watching all these phone calls go across the net without benefit to them, without their making any money.
The cable companies are watching, beginning to watch, first run movies.
being distributed with very early stages of that but of course as these higher
speed connections that you talked about begin to get plugged in
then getting motion pictures and that sort of thing becomes
possible so you're talking about the telephone industry
the motion picture industry uh... cable companies you're talking about some pretty big
movers and shakers uh... in telecommunications going right down the tubes if
something doesn't happen aren't you?
well no because what when i say network neutrality neutrality means
even playing field Everybody has a fair shake.
And if these companies are able to compete in an even playing field, when they don't have a skewed situation, great!
They're going to do wonderful if they can provide good services, attractive services, at a good price.
But remember, they are also our portals to the Internet.
They have control over our access to everybody else's services.
And if they start to constrict on that, Then it's not an even playing field, and that's what the concern is.
That's why there's so much worry about this now.
Well, phone companies, of course, are not so much in control.
Well, yes, they are, I suppose.
They provide the T1s and that sort of thing.
DSL!
DSL, that's true.
But still, many people these days rely on, oh, for example, cable modems or other methods that circumvent the phone company.
You know, actually, you'd be kind of shocked at the statistics in this country.
The most recent statistics that I've seen are from 2004, but there hasn't been that much change.
Back then, only about half the people in the U.S.
had the choice of more than one high-speed service provider.
And a good chunk of the rest couldn't get any high-speed service.
You'd think that it's ubiquitous, but it's really not.
Half the people have no choice at all.
It's either cable, or DSL, or nothing.
Or nothing.
Well of course there is satellite.
Do you think, Lauren, that satellite will ever become a, and I know there are several companies out there who'll scream and yell, but after all there is a bit of a delay that makes satellite service not exactly premium in some ways.
Will it ever become premium?
Will they ever get low earth orbiting constellations of satellites that will make internet fast?
Boy, we've seen those plans Come up and go down in flames over and over again, haven't we?
Yes, we have.
The economics of that is real tough.
Right now, the whole wireless segment of this is just a tiny fraction of the way people get internet.
The problem with satellites is, unless you've got the sky covered with them, basically, the capacity problems are pretty significant.
Plus, they're much harder to install because you have this issue of Putting the dish in the right place.
It's an uplink dish, which means you transmit.
So you can't let people really do that themselves or they'll point in the wrong direction and mess up someone else's satellite.
So it's a lot more complicated.
It's a lot more expensive.
And it just doesn't seem like it's going to be able to pan out with the kind of mass that we see with cable and DSL and those kinds of services.
So I think we're probably going to be kind of stuck with terrestrial.
There are projects to do.
Local radio in communities, local mesh systems.
There's an advanced form of Wi-Fi that's a sort of super Wi-Fi that could be used for within cities.
There's a lot of work being done in those areas.
Maybe one of them will really catch fire and do a good job.
But right now, at this moment, for most people, it's either cable or DSL, if they're lucky to have that choice.
Well, you're quite right.
But as you mentioned, Wi-Fi or some other method or satellites or something will come along to allow these high-speed connections for people even in, you know, fairly rural areas.
And when that finally does occur and when everybody has a high-speed connection, then phone companies, motion picture companies, television networks, my God, Lauren, they're in terrible trouble.
Well, I guess the answer to that is you need to be able to compete on the merits, right?
I mean, you can have subsidies to a certain extent for organizations that deserve subsidies, but the phone companies have often made poor business decisions, for example.
The phone companies have, in many cases, made promises that they have broken.
They have promised to do do broadband systems in cities and then reneged and not
followed through on the agreements that had been made or at least on the promises that seemed
to be there.
So I wouldn't shed too many tears for them.
I know and the cable companies have made promises to get franchises, for example, that they
will serve rural areas and then they serve only the very high density populated areas
that yield very good income for them.
So yeah, I know.
And this is happening again right now.
We call that cherry-picking.
And right now the phone companies, you may have seen, in fact this directly relates to network neutrality, there's been a TV ad campaign called TV Freedom.
Talk, you know, promote the idea of getting an alternative to high-priced cable television.
What that really is, is the phone companies who want to provide TV services, you know, kind of yet another TV service provider, over internet connections to the home, or over fiber connections to the home.
And they have been pushing that, but again, they have been, where's the fiber been going?
Mostly into the places where the poor people aren't.
So cherry-picking is alive and well.
I know.
I know.
Is the day coming, Lauren, where we're going to get fiber in every home?
Is that day coming?
Don't hold your breath.
Not in this country.
Where you are, probably a lot sooner than where I am.
Okay, Lauren Weinstein is my guest.
This is absolutely fascinating stuff.
The internet, I depend on it so heavily, and I'm sure you do too.
So that's the subject for tonight, and it's a very big subject, the internet.
I'm Art Bell, this is Coast to Coast AM.
Cam in San Diego, California asks the question of the night as far as I'm concerned.
I'm an amateur radio operator, ham radio operator, right?
And for ham radio operators, the nightmare of the 21st century clearly is something called BPL.
I've talked about it on the air before.
And we touched on Internet and various means of delivery.
One thing we didn't talk about was BPL.
And that's basically Internet over power lines.
And it's a fascinating question.
It's a scary question for amateur radio operators.
And a lot of people say, well, who cares?
But it's not just the amateur radio operators that are threatened by BPL.
It's nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
In other words, radio, for example.
In a moment, we will ask exactly that question of Lauren Weinstein.
I'm Art Bell.
Lauren, we did discuss any number of means of delivery of the internet to
somebody's home.
What we didn't touch on was a growing, in my opinion, menace called BPL.
It's a plan to carry the Internet over power lines.
Now, it is, in my opinion, a horribly flawed Technology, but they appear to be pushing forward with it.
And I wonder what your feelings are.
Is it going to succeed or has it met with so much objection that it's just going to sort of, you know, be strangled in the crib?
A shocking topic to be sure.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm a ham too.
So this is an area I've been following.
I would prefer not to have the airwaves utterly polluted all the time.
This technology is being pushed.
That's exactly the right word for it.
Now, on one hand, we want to support alternative high-speed access.
This is part of what we were talking about.
But you don't want to kind of throw out the baby with the bathwater with it.
I would kind of, as a thought experiment here, suggest that people think about what's been going on in this country on the East Coast and the West Coast over the last few weeks in terms of heat waves and power failures.
The East Coast, of course, in New York, they were having all kinds of problems.
Out here in the San Fernando Valley, part of Los Angeles, where I am, a couple of weeks ago, I saw 117 degrees in the shade in my backyard.
Now, there's places where that's normal.
It's not normal here.
Transformers were melting, literally melting off the power poles.
And the reason for that is that the power grid in most of this country is antiquated.
It's old.
If it's 40 years old, that's new compared with some of the stuff that's out there.
It hardly is able to supply electricity, even under normal conditions where you don't have a heat wave because people have, you know, the televisions and plasma TVs, the plasma that pulls a lot of power, refrigerators and computers and all these things running all the time.
The grids weren't designed to handle them in total.
So I'd say the first job of the power grid should be to provide Reliable electricity.
You know, just a novel concept.
I'm with you, buddy, but having said all that, since you're a ham, you understand really well what the threat is.
And it's not just to hams, it's to almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
I mean, radio, shortwave, all the rest of it could be gone.
Yeah, well, part of the reason for that is because the grid is in such bad shape.
Because there's so many ways that the grid can leak RF, can leak radio frequency radiation.
And so the design of these systems that are supposed to provide internet over power lines, the theory is that they will prevent this or, more realistically they say, keep it to tolerable levels.
I think we know, usually when these kinds of things are deployed outside the laboratory, things never really work the way you expect.
And what I'm concerned about, much as you are, I suspect, is that the economic pressures to deploy this technology will be such that it'll be very hard to say, well, I'm a ham radio operator.
People say, fine, we don't care about ham radio operators, you guys are has-beens anyway, there's an internet, we don't need you, go away.
And that's how you start it.
And then if someone else says, well, shortwave, we can't hear shortwave anymore.
Ah, who needs shortwave?
You got the internet, you don't need shortwave.
Forget shortwave.
AM radio, maybe that goes next.
Well, and then of course there's government.
The government still uses the shortwave bands for backup communication, and there are a myriad of other people that still use the shortwave bands for communication, and God knows it could even go up and slam VHF as well.
Yeah, I mean, we're worse than that.
I mean, we have to remember that what's really going on here is the utilities looking for another profit center.
I mean that's the bottom line here.
How can we get in on this internet thing?
Well what do we got?
We got power lines.
Let's put the internet on the power lines.
All right, well, let's remove your bias and my bias, because we're both hams.
How's it going with BPL?
Is it going to be deployed?
Or, you know, as hams, we get bulletins saying, well, such and such an experiment failed, and they gave up.
But we don't hear about the ones that are still going.
Yeah, it's mainly at this stage still in limited experimental deployment.
And we are not getting, you know, in the public domain, a lot of information about that.
What I worry about most is that kind of marginal results will be finessed into broad-scale deployment.
In other words, people will say, well, this amount of interference is acceptable, this is acceptable, but when you get it out in the real world, mass distribution, I mean, really being out there, We're going to find that the condition of the power grid is going to result in much more interference than the lab tests and the limited experiments would have shown.
It's hard to roll it back.
Actually, the electric company cannot keep the electromagnetic spectrum clean from leakage that they have now, much less something intended to radiate.
Yeah, it's the kind of technology that has promise in the long run.
If everything is lined up, if you have all your issues lined up just right, and you've got your grid up to snuff, it has promise as technology develops.
As it stands right now, where people are worried about power failures, and this is the United States of America, right?
And we have trouble providing people with power, not just our outages, but I mean, look what happened in Queens.
Where they had these rotting old cables underground there that were God knows how old, and they couldn't even figure out where the problem was.
They were just ripping cables out of manhole covers for days and days.
I think our utilities should be concentrating on getting our power grid out of the 19th century and into the 21st century before they start spending a lot of effort on internet services that are going to have all kinds of potential collateral damage.
Alright, well I'm with you all the way on that.
Now, with respect to what our government is doing in our battle against terrorism, there's an obvious gigantic controversy with respect to what's being monitored, who's being listened to, for what reason, who gets access to the information, all the rest of it.
Where are we now with that?
Well, I think where we are is that due to various leaks, and people can argue whether leaks are a good thing or not in any given case, it's one of those depends on your point of view kind of things, right?
I think it's become clear that the level of surveillance that's going on is much greater than most people assumed was occurring.
And in some cases, in very dramatic fashion.
Now we can argue that the fine points of exactly what's happening, but just from the programs that have been revealed, we know that there's a lot going on.
One of the more interesting ones that relates to the Internet right now is the focus of an ongoing court case, an ongoing lawsuit, which involves the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is Trying to find out whether AT&T was funneling vast amounts of internet traffic to the National Security Agency.
And that's a court case that's ongoing right now.
And the government has taken a very interesting tack on that.
They've taken the approach of saying, well, we can't even tell you whether or not it was going on, because to tell you whether it was going on, we'd have to tell you more than we can tell you, because then that would violate the secrets.
There's a kind of twisted logic to that that we can understand, but again, the principles of this country, as I remember them in civics class, were that you have to kind of move in the direction of liberties first, unless there's a real, real good reason to block them or to reduce them.
Well, that's the way it was.
Yeah, that's the way it was, and the courts are sort of key to that.
What's really of concern in these surveillance situations, whether it's this AT&T NSA one, whatever the truth is behind that, there's been another controversy recently where USA Today, you probably remember, put out a story saying that several of the large regional phone companies were providing vast amounts of call record data.
Now that's different than the actual contents of calls.
The contents of data, which is what was going on supposedly.
Right, but it still tells a very big story.
Who calls who?
Traffic is rich for traffic analysis.
Sure.
And they put out this story and it caused a big controversy and then they had to back off because some of the companies that were involved, I guess all of them to one respect or another, denied it was going on.
And the Senate Subcommittee that's involved in this was saying, well, no, you didn't get that right.
So USA Today kind of found themselves in a situation where I think they still believe that they had the story basically right, but they didn't have the proof lined up.
My suspicion is, and the folks out on Savage Road at NSA, some of whom are probably listening to this right now, they're the ones that know what they really get in terms of transactional records.
One thing we know for sure is that the way the law is right now, it's generally legal.
For the phone companies to hand over all that data.
And in fact, AT&T, this is again the new AT&T, very recently changed their privacy policy.
They've made an announcement that they changed the privacy policy in a way that many people looking at it said, oh, I see, this makes it explicit that you can give the government transaction record data.
Now, if we want to argue that the government should have access to all the information about who calls who all the time, Okay, let's have that argument.
Let's have it in a public forum, whether or not that's a good thing.
Let's set up the structure for it.
Let's set up the mechanisms for oversight.
We can have that argument, and it'll come out one way or another.
But the problem with the way things have been coming down is that this has been going on In secret.
It's been going on without any kind of oversight.
Now, if someone wants to say, well, we can't even discuss the issue with you because that would tell people too much.
It would tell the terrorists too much.
Then we've got a real problem.
Because if we have to operate this country on the basis that the people can't know anything of importance in these areas because the bad guys will find out, then I think the terrorists have won.
I think at that point we have started altering the basic precepts of this country in a way that we basically have already said, we're going to turn ourselves into what you said we were.
And that's a pretty grim prospect, I think.
It truly is grim.
And I'm not sure that I see a way around it.
I'm really honestly not sure.
I mean, unless, as you point out, we have some great Public discussion about whether or not, for example, call records will simply be available to those who need them, meaning our government, or the information in those calls will be available to our government.
And we all know that it's happening and we sort of agree that it's necessary to be done.
I just, you know, I agree with you.
Then we have turned into that which we have been conducting rather large war against.
Yeah.
It's understandable.
It's understandable that there's friction against holding those kinds of discussions.
But the other part of it is that it's a big mistake to assume that terrorists are dumb.
Most of them, at the upper levels, are not.
So it's not as if these guys didn't already assume that calls were being monitored or that their financial transactions were being tracked.
That was another controversy, you'll recall, when there was a A leak of information about the international wire transfer data being surveilled.
They know that's going on, so in a lot of cases what ends up happening is it's just sort of ordinary people, honest, law-abiding citizens who are the ones that are left in the dark.
And I think, my own view is, that discussion of these issues Isn't going to hurt, and if we want to go in that direction of that kind of surveillance, let's do it as a country and agree that we're going to do it and have the oversight mechanisms in place, rather than have it done in secret, in back rooms in Washington, without people knowing what's going on and feeling secure that the information that's collected won't be abused or used in other ways, because we know from history
That when these kinds of data collection surveillance projects take place without good oversight, almost inevitably they end up abused for political purposes or in other bad ways eventually.
So that's something I think we'd want to avoid.
I agree with you completely.
Do you think that our current political structure could allow such a national debate and discussion?
It probably could.
I don't think that it will.
I think that our political structure is a work of genius in many ways.
I mean, the structure of this country, when you look at what we have survived and what we have dealt with and how those guys, so many years ago, sitting in Philadelphia and other places, how they managed to come up with a structure that has managed to survive into the modern world and still be relevant, it's an amazing thing.
But we have allowed distortions.
We have allowed distortions by big money and lobbyists, obviously.
That's a tremendous distortion.
And other things that have kind of skewed the whole thing in ways where, while it's possible for our political system to deal with these things in a good way, the way the acid that takes place now between the political parties, for example, the hatred and the lack of respect and the lack of being able to work together in a realistic way, That makes it impossible.
I mean, you can forget about how good the system is if the people refuse to operate in a reasonable fashion, and I think that's where we are.
All right, well, let me perhaps harm BPL a little more in the eyes of the public, and this is going to require you to give an explanation.
It's two listeners.
From Carson City, Nevada, who says, I'm probably experiencing an uncharacteristic dense moment.
I've been a ham operator since 1966 and I fail to see how information packets over existing power lines could possibly harm or even affect the electromagnetic spectrum.
Now that's one.
You're going to love the second one.
The second one from Matthew says, What about the Feds simply listening to BPL?
I mean, just plug in and copy.
Who needs a warrant?
So, address number one first.
For those who don't know about BPL, how could it harm the electromagnetic spectrum?
Easiest way to put it is that the way it works is by imposing radio signals on the power lines.
That's the simple explanation.
And radio signals, you know, power lines are not shielded.
They're not like, if you think about the cable that comes out of your cable box into the TV, that's coaxial cable.
It's got a shield in it.
It's designed not to radiate signal where you don't want it.
And it still does occasionally anyway.
Yep, because they leak.
Even with all that work, if the connectors crimp the wrong way, they can leak and cause all kinds of problems.
The power lines, if you look at those things out there, they're pretty obvious.
They are not shielded.
They are often bare wires.
They're like giant, wonderful, big antennas.
All over the place.
And they're high up, where they can radiate nicely in a lot of cases.
And what you have to do to make these services work is you have to impose radio carriers on those power lines.
And the idea is that they do this through a very complicated method that's designed Theoretically, not to cause interference, but that's the problem, the difference between theory and practice.
That's right.
So the answer is they're wonderful antennas.
They're high up.
They're long.
They're every ham's dream.
And if you put RF on them, you're going to have a disaster.
They radiate a lot of garbage already.
They do.
But I thought Matthew really came up with a clincher.
He's basically saying, look, if there's BPL, who needs permission to do anything?
Just plug into your wall socket and begin copying.
Yeah, well, of course, what would happen is the way this would work, you wouldn't have access to everything at every wall socket.
I mean, these things would be demarcated in various ways.
But let's face it.
I mean, every mechanism that's available for surveillance, if it's practical to do it, it's going to be done.
I guess sort of the other way to look at it, though, is that the way the laws are heading now, and have already headed, The government has already established ways to get at all kinds of protected information.
You know, phone calls and internet connections, apparently, and all these other things.
So I guess at this stage of the game, power lines would be considered small potatoes.
But if that ever really took off, that would change, of course.
It would be an issue.
All right.
Hold tight, Lauren.
We'll be right back.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
Lauren Weinstein is my guest.
We're talking about the Internet.
We're talking about getting it from here to there, and we're talking about the content, what goes from here to there, from the high rise in Manila.
I'm Art Bell.
Once again, my guest of course is Loren Weinstein.
He'll be right back.
Jesus and Satan were having an ongoing argument about who was better on the computer, the Internet.
They'd been going at it for days, and frankly, God was getting tired of hearing all the bickering.
Finally fed up, God said, that's it!
I've had enough.
I'm going to set up a test that's going to run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.
So, Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards, and they typed away.
They moused.
They faxed.
They emailed.
They emailed with attachments.
They downloaded.
They did spreadsheets.
Wrote reports.
Created labels and cards.
Did charts and graphs.
Did some genealogy reports.
They did every job known to man.
Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency, and Satan was faster than hell.
Then ten minutes before the time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and of course, the power went off.
Satan simply stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.
Jesus, on the other hand, simply sighed.
Finally, the electricity came back on, And each of them restarted their computers.
Satan started searching frantically, screaming, It's gone!
It's all gone!
I've lost everything!
The power went off!
Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.
Satan observed this and became rather irate.
Wait!
He screamed!
That's not fair!
He cheated!
How come he's got all his work and I don't have any?
God simply shrugged and said, Jesus saves.
Now, we all know that when we see that, you know, famous
VeriSign sign that, well, everything's safe and we can go ahead and put all our information in, right?
Here's an interesting little article that I just ran across entitled, German hackers clone RFID e-passports.
Oh my God!
First, the Dutch get their RFID e-passport system cracked.
then Verichip gets its own counterfeit proof, that's always a good word, it's like unsinkable,
RFID implant copied by a pair of hackers in front of an audience, a live audience,
and now some hackers in Germany have undermined some of the security behind the electronic passports
that the United States and other countries are planning to implement this month. Lauren?
We're waiting for the RFID Titanic, aren't we? The irony of this is that it took a lot of pressure on the US government
to get them to use any encryption at all on the RFID passports.
The original feeling was that they were such short range, supposedly, and it's been proven now that the range is a lot more than people thought, if you have the right equipment to interrogate them.
But it took a lot of pressure and pushing to get them to even implement the kind of weak, crummy encryption stuff that's in there now.
Plus, they did agree to put some aluminum foil in the covers so that when they're closed, you've got a little bit of shielding there.
But it was a pretty sorry kind of sequence of events that occurred there.
So it's not too surprising.
Given the weak nature of the systems, that the hackers are one step ahead of the customs department on this one.
Well, there's all this controversy going on about people crossing the borders and so forth, and here they've cracked it before it's even out.
Yeah, that's the can-do attitude, I guess, at work.
What's really happening is that we take shortcuts.
I mean, that's what it amounts to.
You mentioned The VeriSign logo and all that.
There are known ways to use these encryption systems so that they're as strong as possible.
But they can be more complicated.
They can be more expensive.
And we tend to take the short term attitude and say, well, if we could save a few bucks, you know, if you save a nickel on every passport, that adds up.
And the issue of security breaches Seems kind of theoretical to people.
Now, I for one would say, gee, maybe it's not a good idea if someone can remotely send a signal to your passport, suck a lot of the information out of it, and then clone your passport identity.
Maybe that isn't such a great thing for our anti-terrorism Border protection efforts, but you know, if it saves a nickel, I mean, there's people that have to consider that, right?
Great, great, great.
When I go online, let's say I do online banking.
No, let's say that Loren does online banking.
Do you, Loren?
Very, very limited.
Very, very limited indeed.
Why do you not feel safe?
Because I know how some of these things are implemented, I'm afraid.
Interestingly, the big problem is not in the encryption.
It's not in moving the information between A and B. The protocols that are used for that, the TLS protocols and the newer SSL protocols and things like that, are pretty damn good.
And unless there's been breakthroughs in number crunching, of which we are not aware, and massive parallelism and all these things, They're good enough for jazz, for the way we normally use them.
The problem is that the way these systems are implemented at the servers is often just totally awful.
That's the weakest link thing, right?
Yeah, that's where the hackers go.
The hackers don't try to decrypt the traffic, the encrypted traffic that's on the internet passing by.
They go for the servers where some fool has left a web server misconfigured and go in and they just get the entire database all at once.
Yeah, there's been a lot of that lately actually.
Yeah, so it's easy to think in terms of encryption.
The encryption is sort of the sexy part of this.
But the real area that needs the work is the The servers themselves and the competence of the people that set them up and configure them and maintain them.
And some of the more obvious flaws are fixed now compared with a few years ago, but there's always more.
And so I always take the kind of attitude, if you're going to use these systems, be careful and provide minimum information.
I guess that's always kind of a good suggestion.
Or that you have to.
The second largest story right now on the Associated Press running in the last hour's five-minute summary was Dateline, Washington.
Two teenagers were arrested Saturday in the theft of a laptop and a hard drive containing sensitive data on up to 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.
The equipment was simply stolen May 3rd during a burglary at a Maryland home of a Veterans Affairs employee.
So in other words, There's a weak link for you.
We were just talking about them.
I mean, somebody walks into somebody's home, takes one hard drive, and 26.5 million veterans have their information at risk.
Yeah, that's a really interesting case.
You'll recall when that was a big story back when it was originally stolen.
And the government announced they were going to spend some number of millions of dollars, I guess, to give every veteran a free credit check program or something like that.
But what actually happened here was what usually happens.
And this wasn't some brilliant thief who was after that data.
It was just a couple of kids who were opportunistically going around burglarizing.
And they grabbed the laptop.
They didn't care what the data was on it.
They were trying to sell a laptop.
The real question here, and this is what boggles the mind for people that work in this area, is why, in the first place, Was it was the system that the VA was using designed so that the employee had to have that data sitting on his laptop at home in the first place?
Never mind the fact whether or not he had permission to have it at home.
He may well have had permission, but the system should not have been designed.
So we had to have that.
I mean, we do have remote access.
We do have encryption.
We have ways, if he had to be working with that data, he could have been working with it only with the individual items he needed to work with, not have the entire database sitting in his bedroom or something.
So that just shows that just incredibly bad system design.
Well, but again, if the hardware is pretty good and the encryption methods are pretty good, and you're saying they are, the human being is still the weak point.
The problem these days is that we've got these hard drives that can, you know, for example, contain information on 26.5 million people.
One hard drive!
One hard drive!
Your iPod can do that too.
You know, iPods will do it, the little photo card that you put in your digital camera, you can have a 2GB or 4GB, it's unbelievable!
So in this case, of course, what happened is that if the system isn't designed to use encryption in the first place, if you have that data in the clear, you've just created yet another opportunity.
But I think a lot of people don't understand that these little thumb drives, these things people hang on their keychains and such now, these little USB memory devices, people can just walk up to PCs with those, plug it in, whistle a happy tune, unplug it, and have massive data that was stolen under the right conditions.
And we don't really have an environment where by default there's the kind of security we need.
And it's not clear we're going to be getting that anytime soon, statements by Microsoft notwithstanding.
Alright, here's another big controversy in America right now, actually worldwide, and that's electronic voting.
There are complaints about the machines, there are complaints about the way the tallies are transferred, there are complaints and worries about elections being, the results of elections being totally changed.
Should we be worried about this?
We should be absolutely paranoid and concerned beyond belief.
The problems with electronic voting are so deep and so incredibly nightmarish that if you wanted to create a scenario for a takeover of a country, political ramifications, undermining democracies and all that, you could use electronic voting.
That's a very nice plot point for doing that.
It's just amazing, because when these e-voting systems, you'll recall that this all kind of got started with the hanging chad, right?
This is kind of what the impetus was.
We didn't want to have the situation again with people holding old-style IBM cards up to the light and going, well, it's holding on two corners, that means you voted for Gore, you know?
I mean, that was a pretty sorry spectacle.
So we had a lot of people, a lot of companies that said, wow, wait, we can make a buck on this.
And a few of them, including ones whose expertise was mainly in things like ATM machines and things like that, decided they were going to do e-voting machines.
Now, the difference between, the big difference between an ATM machine and an electronic voting machine is that with an ATM machine, A, you get a receipt, right?
And B, if something goes wrong with your account, it's really easy to tell, because you can discover that the hundred bucks isn't there when you look at the balance later.
That's right.
But with an e-voting machine, you put your vote in, and it disappears.
It just goes into a total, and someone collects the total, and says, guess what he won?
And there was tremendous resistance, even after test after test showed that these things could be subverted in any number of ways.
And I don't mean super sophisticated things.
I mean really dumb things where the memory cards weren't right, or you'd reboot the thing and it would go into the wrong mode.
Or worst of all, is in a lot of cases the software for these things, people with a certain level of the software, a certain version, would be certified.
And then at the last minute, the company would remotely change the software, you know, over the phone line or over the internet or whatever, to a new version that had never been certified.
So people started saying, hey, maybe it would be a good idea if the electronic voting machines at least had the level of security of a hanging chad.
And there was tremendous resistance, because there were obvious ways to deal with some of these problems.
And the one that's generally being agreed on now is what's called voter-verified paper trail, where the machine prints a paper receipt.
The paper receipt is kept by the machine, but the person who voted can see it first.
So that if there's a question, those receipts can be used for a real recount.
A recount doesn't mean anything if you just go back to the machine and say, hey, was your count right?
And it goes, yeah, it was right.
Okay, there's our recount.
Another thing is, we don't even necessarily need all these fancy electronic voting machines, because there's other technologies that are much less dramatic and generally very effective, like optical scan.
Where you fill in the bubbles.
Yeah, some people will mess up the bubbles and all that.
But by and large, that's a very nice system because you still have a record of the individual votes, right?
You have those sheets.
And if there's a question, you can count those sheets again.
But that's not dramatic.
It's not that expensive.
So there's not as much money in it.
And you would think that after all this, Congress would be rushing to pass laws to deal with these situations, but there's been
considerable resistance.
I think there's been a gradual move toward an understanding that this is a risk to both
Democrats and Republicans, and that tends to help move these things along.
And there does seem to be movement toward the acceptance of this voter-verified paper
trail technology.
And so in how much of the U.S., for example, have we made that change?
Let's look ahead toward the next presidential election, for example.
What do we have to look forward to?
It won't be all that much.
I don't have the percentage right off the top of my head.
But it has been moving fairly slowly.
And part of the reason is, believe it or not, there are still local election officials Who are fighting this, and saying, our e-voting machines are perfectly secure!
You've got nothing to worry about!
Of course.
And then it turns out the machines are kept in someone's unlocked car, you know, overnight or something, outside their home.
Again, the human factor.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the best technology can be always undermined by people, right?
I guess so.
So it seems.
So for this election coming up, for 2006, There's still going to be a lot of trouble.
Maybe things will be a little bit better by 2008, but it's another one of these long-haul kinds of things.
Gosh!
It's almost enough, I mean, listening to you tonight on these various topics, it's almost enough that if you didn't absolutely depend on it, you just wouldn't do these electronic things for fear.
For fear!
Well, I mean, you don't have to pull the plug on everything, but I guess what irritates me the most is in so many of these situations, it doesn't take rocket science to deal with these problems.
A lot of them are obvious on even minimally reasonable inspection or thinking about it in the first place.
But unfortunately, the powers that be and the forces that are in play are often such that we, like I said, we take the shortcuts and we take the cheap way out.
And so systems that are doomed to fail and that are obvious that they're... I mean, even before these tests on the e-voting, I mean, from a purely theoretical standpoint, you look at e-voting and you know there's going to be problems.
Just about the only thing that could possibly be worse is Internet voting, where you have people trying to vote on their PCs, and we know how secure they are.
But there's people still pushing that concept, too.
I know, I know.
Is it... I was about to ask, is it alive?
And obviously, apparently so.
Yeah, there's still pushing for it.
In fact, some of it goes on right now.
I mean, there have been elections at certain levels, like primaries and things like that, that have used internet voting.
And when people say, boy, what a great idea, I always say, well, you know, think of this.
I mean, if you have a virus that can wipe out your hard disk, why can't you have a virus that changes your vote?
Well, why can't you?
And the answer is, you can.
The answer is, you can, yeah.
It just takes the will to do so.
And what's really ironic is that some of the people that promote these say, well, we hired five hackers from the local high school and we told them to attack the system and they couldn't get in.
So we figure we've got a secure system.
And of course, that's completely different than an operational environment.
But you still see these kinds of farcical displays over and over again.
And sometimes it is enough to make you want to pull the plug, come to think of it.
Who's winning the war, Lauren, between those writing these viruses and distributing them and those who are making the virus programs and trying to keep everything clean?
Who's winning?
It's an ongoing battle.
I think the basic operating systems are getting smarter about this.
There has been Considerable development in this area, but of course now we're starting to see more viruses for Macs and things, which had long promoted the fact that they were less vulnerable.
Actually, that vulnerability was not so much purely for technical reasons, that less vulnerability was not so much for technical reasons per se, but because it was seen as a less attractive target, because there were so many fewer of them.
But what's happened is, as systems have gotten more protected against sort of traditional
viruses and worms, we've seen this wholesale transition to human factors kinds of attacks,
like fishes, you know, all the stuff you're saying, your London financial stock account
has been compromised.
Please click here immediately to provide the information or you will be cut off.
Oh, I've seen so much of that already.
They go out by the millions and millions, knowing it's just a scattershot kind of thing,
knowing that a certain small percentage of people who get them will have those accounts
and they'll go, golly gee willikers, Mr. Wizard, this is scary, I better click on this.
Hey, a damn near got me, buddy.
Listen, we're at the top of the hour and I want, when we come back, we're going to open the lines and let people ask you questions.
And I'm sure there are zillions of them by now.
So hold tight, Lauren.
We'll do exactly that.
So if you've got a number, one of our numbers, call it right now and you'll have an opportunity to talk to Lauren.
I'm Art Bell.
From one side of the world to the other.
Can you believe it?
My guest is Loren Weinstein, and this is going to be your opportunity this hour.
I've certainly had enough fun with him, to ask him any sort of question you would like.
Now, if you're like me, even hearing all of this scary stuff, it's certainly not going to be enough to get me to put down my keyboard.
I don't know about you, but still, still, this has been some worrisome stuff.
So if you have questions about what you've heard, He's the guy to ask, and you know how to do it.
Those are the numbers.
So in a moment, all of you and Loren Weinstein.
All right, Loren, are you ready for the general public?
I am ready and willing here.
All right, well, here they come.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein and Art Bell.
Hi.
All right, Lauren and listeners, I'm Andy in Columbia, South Carolina.
Hi, Andy.
Yes, sir.
Hey, in the Philippines, it's interesting to talk to across the world, around the world like this.
I have a couple points that will be comfort and reassurance to people who are facing long aggravating power outages, and the second point will be just in general, you know, all the time, and y'all can brush up on any fine points.
I'm interdisciplinary, multi-science researcher, and therefore I can generally dig only so deep in any one field.
The electric utilities, whether they're private or public, have absolutely no economic interest in downtime.
They don't make money unless those meters are turning, other than any fixed cost, like what they sometimes call a facilities charge.
And therefore, they're with the customer in the eagerness to get the power back on.
And I've written the IBEW headquarters for care of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, advocating some kind of bonus to be paid for a reward for deliberate, yet cautious pace of work.
I say that because the power load is potentially lethal, both in the transmission circuit Which is between the power generating station and the electrical substation near the customer.
Well, I don't think anybody's saying that they're not doing the very best they can.
We're saying the infrastructure is not capable of delivering the kind of demand that there is presently.
That's what we were saying.
Now, you had another question?
Yeah, and the second point is something interesting to customers in general.
The electric meter, somebody called a local talk show and was begrudging the fact he was having to pay For not only the electricity he was using, but also the electricity to turn the meter.
That meter turning is not a cost to the customer because there's no electric motor in there.
It's simply the fact that a half-positively magnetized, half-negatively magnetized wheel.
Care for the balance?
Yeah.
Alright, well I think I've... Right, I've got that.
You don't pay for the meter turning.
But if you want to scare her, go watch it turn.
Wildcard Line, you are on the air with Lauren Weinstein.
Hello.
Good evening, Art.
Good evening.
How are you doing?
Just fine, sir.
Wow, it is so good to talk to you.
I've never talked to you before, but I'm for sure a long-time listener.
Hey, I got a quick question for Lauren.
Sure.
What would you think about securing the PC?
I know some companies are out there doing it now, but securing your PC at the mouse and the keyboard level where you would actually interface with your computer?
What do you mean by secure?
I was thinking maybe taking a scan of maybe the bottom part of your palm.
So you're talking about a biometric identification system of some sort?
Correct.
Actually, it's kind of interesting, of course, I'm seeing ads now, I guess for Best Buy or Circuit City, or one of them, where they're promoting fingerprint identification for new laptops for students to buy to go back to school.
Lauren, I've got it right on the VIO in front of me has a little fingerprint scan.
I have not activated it yet.
I'm afraid of it.
Well, I mean, the real problem is it's pretty problematic how much use those things really are because if someone's going to go after your computer and they're going to have physical access to it, they're probably just going to rip the disk out.
Well, that's true.
And they're not going to care too much about the... And right now, of course, most disks contain unencrypted data.
That might change in the future, but for now, it's easy enough to bypass those things.
It was interesting, though, he mentioned keyboards, because there were actually experiments some years back with security systems that would detect the cadence of the way you typed.
In other words, it wasn't just typing the right password, but you had to type it in your characteristic fashion.
But a lot of those didn't really pan out, because people tend to be, you know, kind of sloppy.
Well, I'm not sure why.
Should I be afraid of this?
I mean, I love Vaio.
It's just absolutely the best.
But my Vaio has a little fingerprint thing on it, and you've got to activate it.
Those things aren't really... The way most of those things are implemented, they don't even really take your whole fingerprint or anything.
They're just measuring certain points, a limited set of...
parameters. So it's sort of a harmless toy and I wouldn't be too worried about
it but I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it either. Well my worry was something
would change or it wouldn't remember it properly and I'd never get back into my
computer. Or you suffer an injury on your finger. There are always ways to bypass those things.
I'm not good with superglue, I'd probably superglue my fingers.
There are always ways to bypass, but you bring up a very interesting point, which is, and this is a real serious issue, there's all this push now for biometrics and identifications, ID cards and for all kinds of access systems and all that, especially for ID cards.
They talk about for border control, all of this.
And you have to wonder, What happens to people whose biometric information is compromised?
It can be compromised in the database.
It can be compromised by cloning.
There's a professor out there somewhere who has made a very nice hobby out of cloning fingerprints.
He started with gummy bears and developed a technique for that and gradually got more sophisticated.
And he can fool these fingerprint systems A large percentage of the time, even if they want body heat, you know, detect the heat as well as the fingerprint.
So what happens when somebody compromises your fingerprint data or your iris data or your retinal data or something like that?
What do you have to do?
I was going to ask about retinal scans.
Yeah, well, all these things are subject to being compromised with varying degrees of difficulty.
And then the poor person who has been compromised is kind of in a box because you can't easily go out and buy a new retina.
Or buy a new fingerprint, or buy a new iris.
Your biometrics, in general, are unchangeable.
So once that has been compromised, you're pretty much up the creek.
And this is a part of biometrics that isn't discussed, because, of course, we're sold the bill of goods on all the 21st century high-tech aspects of it, and not the down-to-earth ways that they can screw up.
Well, Mr. the Rockies, you're on the air with Loren Weinstein.
Oh, hello.
All right.
Yes.
This is Hank, fellow ham.
Yes.
It kind of crashed noise there when you brought me up.
I wasn't sure I had me on.
I just had to comment about the voting machines.
It was discussed a little earlier.
We have it out here in Orange County.
We're using them and it's not touched.
It's not a touch screen.
You've got to turn a little dial, but it does have the paper record, as was mentioned, which I think is great.
I had severe misgivings when we first started, but after I looked into it more completely, I decided these are okay.
But the main reason I called was to talk to you about another voting method maybe you've heard about called IRV, Instant Runoff Voting.
No.
Okay, well...
The way it works is it eliminates the need for runoff elections.
So think about the millions of dollars we save and how few people turn out for runoff.
This is the one where you take the highest and then the next?
Right.
You vote for your candidates in order of preference.
One, two, three, four, and so on.
Because how many times have you not voted for your first choice because you knew they had little chance of winning and there was somebody else you definitely did not want to win, so you voted for somebody else Well, I might have been one of those, because I'm just now hearing about this.
Yeah, that's a very interesting system.
I mean, the part about it that kind of makes me wonder, though, is are you going to be
able to explain it to people in a reasonable way where there won't be a lot of people afterwards
filing lawsuits saying that people didn't understand how it worked?
Well, I might have been one of those because I'm just now hearing about this.
I had no idea.
So the whole idea is to eliminate runoffs?
Yeah, the idea is basically to say that instead of just having one person that you're voting for, you have preferences.
And those preferences, you know, from top to bottom, essentially, are then used to determine who the winner is.
But it is difficult to explain.
And for that reason, I think it may have considerable problems being widely adopted in general-type elections in this country, but time will tell, I guess.
That's not really a technology issue, it's just an issue of how you define winning.
Sure.
First Time Caller online.
You're on the air with Loren Weinstein and Art Bell.
Hi.
Good evening, Loren.
How you doing, Art?
Hi there, just fine.
Great to talk to you guys.
Long-time listener, Art.
I was in a traveling band, and you got me from point A to point B many nights.
Boy, the talk radio really is fantastic for that.
Isn't it a long trip?
It just goes whizzing right by.
Go right ahead.
I've done some major stretches listening.
I wanted to talk to Lauren.
I wanted to touch on your topic before.
Oh, by the way, listening on Streamlink and chatting with all the Coast Riders and the Streamlink forums.
Talking to you actually on a Vonage phone through a T1 connection.
I run a web hosting company, so I'm into tonight's show extremely.
In reference to before about certain companies thinking about privatizing networks and charging for access to those networks, how can large companies like Google and companies like that consider even charging?
Because you know Google will be involved in that.
They're buying up everything else anyway.
But how can they charge for access when they themselves are costing web hosters and costing website owners money in the form of bandwidth from their crawling to catalog pages for their search engines?
And the hosters are paying for that, and I know a lot of my websites, even small ones, they're paying for about a gigabyte a month of Google traffic, and Ankitomi Slurp, and all these other search web crawlers.
I just, I don't see how these companies are going to get away with it.
Well, you're sort of taking the anti-net neutrality stance, I'd say here.
You're taking the ISP stance on this.
Right.
Which is the opposite of my stance, and that's good, I like that.
I think the issue here is that Google, or anybody, any service provider, Google gets used as an example a lot because they're big and obvious and they're the 800-pound gorilla right now.
Right.
But they are paying massive amounts of money for access to the Internet right now.
They paid, you know, when an individual... They're not paying any part of my T1 bill.
Well, that's the whole principle involved here.
You pay for access to the network, you pay for bandwidth to the network, and everybody pays for access.
And then you move the data around.
Now, the issue of crawling is a very simple one, in that you can tell crawling to stop.
Well, wait a minute.
What's crawling?
Crawling is when a search engine or any internet site Google sends out probes that look through the webpages.
That's how these indexes are built up of information.
So Google, for example, has processes, computers that go out, and they're looking at webpages and reading them, and then build their indexes so when you put a search in, it can figure it out.
Alright, robots.
Right, robots.
In fact, the method for controlling these things is robots.txt.
And you can say, Google, stay away, if that's what you want to do.
But most people aren't informed of that, especially, you know, most of your average public that's buying websites and first-time hosters, and even long-time hosters.
They don't, you know, they don't understand these methods, and they're still getting, incurring the cost.
Well, I think, well, first off, most people, I think robots.txt is very widely known among, I mean, most of the ISPs I look at now, and their introductory information for people setting up websites, discuss that.
Not many people pay attention to that, though.
We're talking about the general public.
It's very difficult.
We could say the same thing about software license agreements, right?
People don't pay attention, they don't read them, and they get into trouble.
But in this case, a bigger issue is that if you pay for access to the network, And you pay for the bandwidth that you're going to use.
How do you ever deal with all of the potential administrative points along the way who might say, well, I want a cut of that also?
Just from a purely logistical standpoint, it's a nightmare.
Now, if we want to go down that path, if that's the way we want to go, then people have to realize that most of the services that they get for free now aren't going to be free anymore.
There has to be a trade-off somewhere.
If you want to charge as an ISP, if you want to charge a service provider, a service application such as Google or someone else, Yahoo or whoever, and you want to say, well, you've got to pay me because you're using my bandwidth to get to my customer, then you'd better expect to have to pay to use those services.
Now, maybe that's another discussion we need to have, but I think that if we go down that path
we're gonna end up in a situation where small entrepreneurs who could
turn out the next great development are going to be locked out
because right now you can buy access to the internet and you have equal access
pretty much with anybody else for the bandwidth you buy if the price of of entry for new services and new ideas on
the internet is paying everybody all along the line for bandwidth
then we are not going to have those kinds of services if that's the way you want to go
perhaps that's a possibility but I would prefer to see the model
where we have a neutral internet you buy your access at the point where you connect
and we keep the rest as egalitarian as we possibly can Let me tell you an interesting story, Lauren.
It has to do with people's attitudes about the Internet.
When Coast to Coast first began, there was no Internet.
In fact, I had a little BBS up to take care of the traffic and that sort of thing.
Then, Coast to Coast moved to the network, and in the beginning, when the Internet began, we would provide Free streaming to the very few people who were listening on the Internet.
It was not a problem.
We just sort of ate the cost of the bandwidth and we simply provided it.
But, you know, then coast-to-coast got bigger, bandwidth became more expensive, and people had sort of a fixed idea in their mind Because we had provided it for free, that this would always, that the internet was free.
That being able to listen to somebody's stream, somebody's program on the internet, was just a free thing.
And so when we began to have to charge, which of course we did for Streamlink, Uh, because of the millions of people and the amount of bandwidth.
Bandwidth is money.
It's just, you know, you can equate bandwidth to money.
It's just like gold.
And so eventually we had to begin charging for listening to the program and people went berserk.
Why would you start charging for something that was free?
I mean, they just totally, by the millions, my friend, went berserk.
And only now is it beginning to dawn on the American public and the world's public, I guess, that bandwidth is money.
Is that right?
It's big money.
Big money?
It's big money.
But the issue here boils down to who is getting charged.
So, for example, in your case, the Streamlin case, Sure.
You have an end-user subscriber who is subscribing to a service, and he's paying for it.
Directly.
There's really nothing wrong with that model.
No, no, no.
But see, they thought, you know, I pay my internet provider, and so why in the hell should I have to pay for Streamlink?
Well, here's the other side of the question, though, and this is what really cuts to the heart of this controversy.
Which is, okay, you have the subscriber who wants to listen to the Art Bell Show over the internet, right?
Who wants to listen coast-to-coast over the internet.
And he is paying the show, he's paying Premier, for example, for access to those streams.
Now, he's also paying for his internet access.
Should the phone company Who is providing the DSL circuit say, hey wait a minute, wait a minute here, that's a popular show.
I want a cut of the money that Premier is making.
Premier, you better start paying me.
I want 10% of every dollar that people use to access Streamlink, to access Coast2Coast.
That's the problem.
Is that going to happen?
Yeah, is it going to happen?
The way Congress is behaving right now, it very well could.
So Premier is actually in the same position as Google in this case.
The phone companies are liable to be coming along, and the cable companies, if they think they can do it with impunity, and have their hands out and say, you want to access my subscriber?
You give me a cut.
Hold tight, we're at the bottom of the hour.
I had not thought that far ahead.
I mean, here I was just thinking about Premier getting all of these emails saying, oh my God, why do I have to pay for that?
But now, beyond that, maybe there's going to be the phone company or the cable company wanting a piece of the action.
From a high rise in Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
Well, once again, here I am.
What about the attitude, Lauren, and don't answer this just yet, but the attitude that, well, you know, yeah, I'm on the Internet, and yeah, I do this and that, and I send email to my friends and all the rest of that, but frankly, the war on terrorism is very important.
We also, you know, what happened on 9-11, nobody wants any part of anything like that ever again.
So, if my communications are monitored, if people are reading my email, well, I'm not really saying anything that I'm ashamed of.
I'm not really saying anything that's going to, oh, I don't know, get me slammed in jail or get me audited by the IRS or any of the rest of it.
So, from my point of view, it's worth it.
I wonder how he would answer that question.
In a moment, we'll find out.
Let's try it in a slightly different way actually.
Let's try it in a slightly different way actually.
Let's try it in a slightly different way, actually.
Lauren, let's say that it's Lauren Weinstein, President of the United States.
Thank you very much.
And I'm your, quick promotion, and I'm your National Security Advisor, and I come to you and I say, We understand that there's chatter going on and there's probably another 9-11 or even worse.
Somebody may have a nuclear weapon out there and it may even be within our borders already, Mr. President.
Now, we're asking you to sign an executive order allowing you, allowing us rather, to monitor all of the internet and telephone communications occurring in the United States and that going internationally as well.
Would you as president say, look, no, the answer is no, until we have a national discussion and debate about this issue, I'm going to have to say no, or would you sign the executive order if you thought there might be a nuclear weapon out there?
Obviously such a decision would have to be based on the information available at that time, however, based on this hypothetical.
Well, it's hypothetical, but I just gave you the criteria.
Yeah, I would say no, but the reason is maybe different than what you might suspect.
Okay.
And the reason I would say no is that I would be extremely concerned that any such broad-based communications monitoring would gather so much useless information that it would hide the very tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of communications that were actually relevant.
Yes, but if you're having to balance that against Cincinnati going up in a mushroom cloud... Well, but that's completely irrelevant.
I mean, the whole point to surveillance is to target it where it needs to be.
When you start doing broad-based surveillance, you obviously run into all the privacy issues, which for the case of this hypothetical I'm not getting into, but you know how I feel about that.
But you also have the problem that if you start looking everywhere You're not concentrating your efforts where they need to be.
And we only have limited resources.
We have limited resources for human intelligence, especially translation intelligence, when it comes to the ability to translate.
I mean, as you probably know, part of what came out of the 9-11 Commission and other related commissions after various events has been that information had already been collected by some surveillance that might have potentially been relevant But there was nobody to translate it, or to look at it, or to analyze it, because there was just too much of it.
So that says that broad-based surveillance can actually be your enemy, rather than your friend.
Well, perhaps for the moment, but will there not come a time when we will have computers that have so much power, Lauren, that they will be able to decipher and decide and pass on to human beings what is potentially interesting and or dangerous?
Anyone who would attempt to make a prediction about the powers of those kinds of machines in the future would be a fool, because it's impossible to imagine where we will be heading in that direction.
Well, it's not impossible to imagine we'll keep going forward.
Well, we will move forward, but exactly where we will end up, I mean, artificial intelligence has been a disappointment for many, many years, but there's always breakthroughs, there's always incremental steps, So the machines are going to become very, very powerful in that regard.
You're sort of faced with a twin dilemma here.
On one side, you have the well-known phrase that people that have done nothing wrong have nothing to hide.
That was my other question.
We've all heard that.
On the other hand, you have the statements of people whom I assume we respect, like Benjamin Franklin.
Who took a point of view that if you were giving up privacy to try to get security, you were making a very bad decision.
And in fact enshrined things like, you know, we have now enshrined things like unreasonable search and seizure protections and things like that in the Bill of Rights.
But of course Benjamin didn't have a high-speed internet connection either.
Nor was he dealing with nuclear weapons.
But the fundamentals remain pretty much the same.
We could create a society That was much more secure than what we have now if we choose to do so.
But that society will be very, very different than what I suspect most of us want to see.
If you want to live in a surveillance police state, that can provide a lot of security.
I think you trade a different, you get a different set of problems.
And I don't think most of us would want to live in that police state.
And again, as we discussed some time back, have you not lost the war with terror at that point?
If you create the world of 1984, haven't you lost?
A better question might be, have we not already lost?
No, I don't think we have.
You don't think so?
No, I don't think we have.
I think that we have, at this stage, Managed to hold on to the fundamental aspects of what make this country great.
It's a thin line.
Well, my next line, my next statement was going to be, but we are at risk.
We are at serious, serious risk.
And a lot of it does boil down to oversight.
You know, as we move in the direction of more surveillance and more of these kinds of operations, it is utterly critical that there be oversight every step along the way because
without it that's when reasonable operations turn into abusive operations.
Alright, Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Lauren Weinstein and Art Bell.
Hi.
Welcome back on the air.
Glad to hear you.
Thank you.
It's been a long time.
okay in regards to bpl uh... most of the systems that are used
uh... uh... carried on the high voltage line distribution lines
and that's what radiates and there's a very definite problem with that uh... it could even
uh... not only interfere with uh... emergency communications on high
frequencies uh... is used by the government
uh... military affiliate radio system which of which i'm a member of hands and so
on uh... could even cause plane crashes by interfering with
their communications there is a low voltage system
uh... which is goes on the power line into the house but does not get on the
high voltage lines uh... which is clean as proven by the american radio relay
league Thank you.
So, hopefully that will be the system which eventually prevails.
You know, let the market decide.
I'm Ham, like yourself.
I think one of the problems is that if you're only going to use the low voltage system, you have to have a way to get the data to those transmission points, to people's drops, essentially.
And that means building another network, which is a much more expensive proposition than just dumping the data onto the high voltage lines, which It's much more economical, but then introduces all of these additional interference problems.
Right, I agree with that.
They probably have to run either a fiber optic cable or a coaxial cable from one transformer to the next to be able to do that.
That's virtually building a whole new network.
As you pointed out, I don't know, it's catch-22 really.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Loren Weinstein.
Hey Art, I had a quick question for your guest, a couple of quick questions and one quick comment.
I think that when you were talking about the phone lines or the phone companies versus the internet companies earlier, I couldn't help but to draw a parallel between their old technology and the old technology of the oil companies right now and their animosity against people with alternative energy.
I guess that's just, uh, you know, capitalistic socialism that we live in.
Um, but, um, I did have a couple of quick questions for Lauren.
The first one was, um, why are the internet rates, uh, for DSL, cable, whatnot, why are they not coming down?
They're going up.
And the second question I had was, um, does he foresee a day when, um, you actually have to pay for access to each website that you go to, just like TV.
You know, TV at one time was free.
You went, you know, you turn on the TV, you had these channels that you went to.
Of course, now you have to pay for them.
And you know, to make it even more specific, like for Google, for example, will there be
a day when you have to pay for, say, we're going to charge you for every 10 inquiries
you make, you know, or something like that?
All good questions.
Question number one first.
Why aren't rates going down like they should?
And I think the short answer to that is that we have seen massive consolidation of internet service providers.
There used to be ISPs on every street corner, basically.
And now it's basically boiled down to, for high-speed access anyway, which is what everybody wants, It's the cable company and the phone company for most people, if you have that choice.
And as I was saying, only about half the people even have that much choice.
When you're in a situation where there's been that kind of consolidation, there isn't a lot of incentive to lower prices.
It's the old, you know, Econ 101 again.
The second question was, will there come a day when you've got to pay for every search or for access to every website?
That's the nightmare scenario.
If this network neutrality kind of issue goes the wrong way, if we don't maintain a neutral Internet, that is the kind of thing that could happen.
It won't happen tomorrow.
It would take time, but the forces would be in play to lead us toward that kind of pay-per-view world that the phone companies and the cable companies would love to see, but that most people using the Internet right now don't realize could happen to them very broadly.
How far down the line might something like that nightmare occur if things go the wrong way?
Well, I think what would happen is that we'd see this kind of thing happening first in the areas that are most broadband.
I mean, the alternative services that we're trying to provide, audio and video and things like that.
That would be the first area, because those would be competing the most directly with the kinds of offerings that the phone companies, for example, want to make.
Their TV over Internet offerings and things of that sort.
That would be where the phone companies would have the most incentive to try to crack down early.
If that was successful, if it proved its worth to the phone companies, and if we didn't have any restrictions in place to prevent it from happening, then you would start to see it contaminate Broader and broader to websites as other players got involved and said, hey, we want to cut, too.
If this went the wrong way, you could really have a snowball effect, because you don't just have the phone company that the subscriber talks to.
What a lot of people don't understand is that your communications can move over, just talking to one website, can pop over many different entities.
Well, if you think about it for a moment, Lauren, from the phone company's point of view, not that I'm necessarily wanting to take their side on this, but they are providing these wideband T1, T2, T3 and T4 connections that are carrying the information that is slowly but surely destroying them.
Well, that's an unfortunate situation that their business model hasn't evolved.
But essentially, people are paying for all of that bandwidth somewhere.
And if you want to go toward a model where to move a packet to an internet site, every individual entity along that path is going to demand a cut.
Then you can be absolutely sure that you're not going to have free services at some point in the future unless they are supported through some kind of advertising model that's hard to visualize given the way these pricing situations can go.
I agree, but if you look at it from the phone company's point of view, they are providing the wideband connections that are destroying them.
And it must be a weird feeling in the boardrooms when they sit around and talk about this.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Loren Weinstein.
Hi.
Yes, my name is Ron, calling from Mill Valley, California.
Hi, Ron.
And I wanted to mention to Loren, is he aware of the Senator Barbara Boxer's bill, 450 Count Every Vote Act, which was introduced last year that's supposed to get a paper trail?
Yeah, these do exist.
These bills do exist.
Right.
The problem is that It is difficult to get it at the federal level.
I mean, individual states are moving much faster on this than the feds are.
See, I understand that it's stuck in committee, that Trent Lott and Christopher Dodd.
They can't seem to get it out of committee.
It's kind of hard to see why honest politicians would want to prevent honest voting, but, you know, it's a strange world.
It is a strange world, isn't it?
First time caller line, you're on the air with Loren Weinstein and Art Bell.
How you doing?
Hey, Loren.
Hey, Art.
How you guys doing this evening?
Yeah, hi.
I'm fine.
Where are you, sir?
I'm actually in Buffalo, New York.
Great state of New York.
I got a couple of questions for you there, Loren.
I'm really new to this whole computer thing.
I mainly surf the internet and play games.
I'm into online gaming and whatnot.
But there are, one thing I haven't heard you guys talk about tonight are the SpyBot and AdAware programs that actually steal your bandwidth.
Oh, alright, that's it.
Actually, you're absolutely right.
We haven't touched on that, but he's right.
They do steal bandwidth.
There's absolutely no question about it.
They slow your computer down, they screw you up.
Lauren?
Yeah, they're a real problem.
Again, we've had problems even getting reasonable laws passed to make many of those activities illegal.
Interestingly enough, I don't know, Art, if you heard about this, but Microsoft was embroiled in something of a PR disaster recently when it turned out that they had been deploying to people's PCs, as part of their anti-piracy software, a little program that actually Made a connection to Microsoft every time the system was booted, and it turned out once a day also, that hadn't been disclosed.
No, I had not heard about that.
And that actually, I plead guilty for kind of getting that one out there, because I'm the one that originally blogged that story, and then it kind of blew up.
The upshot was that Microsoft admitted that they really should have handled that differently, but the interesting aspect was, The question of what is spyware was that would you consider that activity to be spyware because it did make connections that we didn't know were being made as opposed to insidious really insidious spyware that like goes through your machine.
Alright, let's talk about the insidious.
Alright, the insidious stuff.
Why is that simply not illegal like hacking?
I mean, you have a lot of powerful forces in play.
There have been moves now.
Much of that is now becoming illegal, but there are definitional problems.
And part of what's made this difficult is that we could easily agree that a program that goes into your computer and steals your banking account information, that's illegal, right?
That should be illegal.
Yeah.
But there are business models that have been built up on, for example, tracking what people do and then sending them advertisements that pop up on their computer.
Well, that ought to be legal, too.
Right.
But that becomes a tougher sell because there's a lot of money involved in that.
So people get into this.
They're kind of trying to cut a very thin line and say, well, this is legal, but this is legitimate business.
And that slows the whole process down when those kinds of arguments occur, as you can imagine.
Listen, buddy, we're out of time.
It's been a wonderful program.
I want you to plug your website.
It's Vortex.com, right?
Yeah, that's the best site to use.
All right.
What's on there?
That leads off to all kinds of different things.
It leads off to the Privacy Forum and some of my discussions and my blog and things like that.
And there's some fun stuff on there, too.
So it's always of use.
And it's free!
You don't have to pay even a nickel to use it.
That's V-O-R-T-E-X dot com, right?
That's right.
Also, you have another one, that's P-F-I-R dot org?
Right.
That's the People for Internet Responsibility site, and that's where a lot of these policy discussions and issues, position papers and things like that are that relate to many of the issues that we have been discussing this morning.
Lauren, you have been wonderful.
Thank you, my friend.
Always a pleasure to join you.
Thank you very much, Art.
You have a good night.
That's Loren Weinstein.
I'll tell you folks, what a fabulous program.
Tomorrow night, Howard Bloom will be here.
It's going to be a good one.
I will see you then.
From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
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