Anyway, I believe I believe I've killed enough time so ladies and gentlemen a Person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction Corey. Dr. Oh So when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English There is a disclaimer and an apology because I am one of nature's fast talkers When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization I was known as the scourge of the simultaneous translation core I Would stand up and speak and turn around and there would be window after window of translator and every one of them would be doing this So in advance I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this and I will slow down So tonight's talk Tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks all the time Questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them If you want to hear freelance writers like me bang on about what's happening to the way that we earn our living by all means go and Find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube But tonight I want to talk about something more important. I want to talk about general purpose computers Because general purpose computers are in fact astounding so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them To figure out what they're for to figure out how to accommodate them and how to cope with them Which unfortunately brings me back to copyright Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose Computer are important in the beginning. We had packaged software and the attendant industry And we had sneaker net so we had floppy disks in ziplock bags or in cardboard boxes hung on pegs in shops and sold like candy bars and magazines and they were eminently susceptible to duplication and so They were duplicated quickly and widely and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software Enter DRM 0.96 They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or other or started to insist on other other physical Indicia which the software could check for dongles hidden sectors challenge response protocols that required that you had physical possession of large unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy and of course these failed for two reasons First they were commercially unpopular of course because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate Purchasers while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched the legitimate Purchasers resented the non functionality of their backups They hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles And they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their software and Second these didn't stop pirates who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication Typically the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise of Equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized it really wasn't figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around the defects in shitty floppy disk media were both core skills for Computer programmers and were even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough and ready early days of software development Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as network spread once we had bbs's online services Usenet news groups and mailing lists the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these Authentication systems could be packaged up in software and passed around as little crack files Or as the network capacity increased the crack disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own Which gave us DRM 1.0? By 1996 it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen We were about to have an information economy Whatever the hell that was They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information Now information technology makes things efficient So imagine the markets that an information economy would have you could buy a book for a day You could sell the right to watch the movie for one euro and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second You could sell movies for one price in one country and another price in another and so on and so on the Fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of numbers a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it But none of this would be possible unless we could control how people use their computers and the files that we transfer to them After all it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24-hour right to a video or the right to move music onto an iPod But not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device But how the hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to make this work You needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes For example, you could encrypt the file and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain Circumstances, but as they say on the internet now you have two problems You also now have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear And you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys because if the user finds the keys She'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app And now you have three problems because now You have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users And now you've got four problems Because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users How to do it to and now you've got five problems Because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were That's a lot of problems, but by 1996 we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization which created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media clear texts from the unlocking programs while they were running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets, and all with a handy streamlined process that lets you remove stuff from the internet without having to screw around with lawyers and judges and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever. The information economy, the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world as they say on the aircraft carriers, mission accomplished. Well, of course, that's not how the story ends because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. After all, these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs. They made it illegal to tell people what you found. When you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened. In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage of these laws. Copying will only ever get easier. Here, 2011, this is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you around the Christmas table and say, tell me again, grandpa, tell me again, grandma, about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything and transferred in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it. Tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy things back in 2011. And so, reality asserted itself and everyone had a good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st century and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity for all. Well, not really. Because like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly and then has to swallow a bird to catch the spider and a cat to catch the bird and so on, so must a regulation that has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation but get a new regulation aimed at showing up the failure of the old one. Now it's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil or possibly evilly clueless and just leave it there which is not a very satisfying place to go because it's fundamentally a council of despair. It suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened. It's not that regulators don't understand information technology because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people not disciplines and issues. We don't have a member of parliament for biochemistry and we don't have a senator from the great state of urban planning and we don't have an MEP from child welfare but perhaps we should. And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics and not technical disciplines nevertheless often do manage to pass good rules that make sense and that's because government relies on heuristics. Rules of thumb about how to balance out expert input from different sides of an issue but information technology confounds these heuristics. It kicks the crap out of them in one important way and this is it. One important test of whether or not a regulation is fit for purpose is first whether of course it will work but second of all whether or not in the course of doing its work it will have lots of effects on everything else. If I wanted congress or parliament to write or the EU to regulate a wheel it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up and said well everyone knows wheels are good and right but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery can't we do something about this? The answer would of course be no because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys and we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies no one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems but if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous and I said I would like you to pass a law that says it's illegal to put a hands-free phone in a car the regulator might say yeah I take your point we'll do that and we might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea whether or not my evidence made sense but very few of us would say well once you take the hands-free phones out of the car they stop being cars. We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special purpose at least in comparison to wheels and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already specialized technology. In fact there's that heuristic that we can apply here. Special purpose technologies are complex and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility. This rule of thumb serves regulators well by and large but it is rendered null and void by the general purpose computer and the general purpose network, the PC and the internet. Because if you think of computer software as a feature that is a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could reasonably say make me a computer that doesn't run spreadsheets and that it would be no more an attack on computing than make me a car without a hands-free phone is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and sites as features of the network then saying fix the internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent or fix the internet so that the piratebay.org no longer resolves, it sounds a lot like change the sound of busy signals or take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking. Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and houses and every other substantial area of technological regulation fails for the internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for whom ideas like touring complete and end to end are meaningless. So our regulators go off and they blithely pass these laws and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the internet. Programs we're not allowed to publish and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the internet is to say that that infringes copyright. It fails to attain the actual goal of the regulation. It doesn't stop people from violating copyright but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement. It satisfies the security syllogism. Something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done and thus any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset. This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I have a friend who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they thought up a great idea for detergent. From now on, they were gonna make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you wash them. Well, after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of entropy to the marketing department, they arrived at another solution, solution. They developed a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, which were the kind that you get with broken fibers that made your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the detergent was literally digesting your clothes. Using it would cause your clothes to literally dissolve in the washing machine. This was the opposite of making clothes newer. Instead, you were artificially aging your clothes every time you washed them. And as a user, the more you deployed the solution, the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up today. You actually had to go buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart. So today we have marketing departments who say things like, we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio or routing packets or playing Xbox games and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits. And on the surface, they seemed like a reasonable idea. Just a program that does one specialized task, like streaming, rather, after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender and we can install a motor in a dishwasher and we don't worry about whether it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that only runs the appliance app. We're making a computer that can run every program but which uses some combination of root kits, spyware and code signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped down computer. It is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running every program we can compile except for some program that we don't like or that we prohibit by law or that loses us money. The closest approximation we have to this is a computer with spyware, a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware. There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to people who have this hypothesis in which Sony loaded covert root kit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them, and which also hid the root kit's existence by causing the kernel to lie about which processes were running and which files were present on the drive. But it's not the only example. Just recently, Nintendo shipped the 3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way. And if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself. Human rights activists have raised alarms over UFE, the new PC bootloader that restricts your computer so it runs signed operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSs unless they have covert surveillance operations. And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance and control measures that we know from repressive governments. So SOPA, the American US Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSEC because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it bans tools like TOR because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA would probably work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argue that these measures are effective in those countries and so they would work in America too. I mean, don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA. Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright and the internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies. But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously, which is why on the one hand, Canada has had parliament after parliament introduce one stupid copyright law after another, but on the other hand, parliament after parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill. It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure, stupid piece together, molecule by molecule, into a kind of stupidite 250 that is normally only found in the heart of a newborn star. And it's why this rush through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break so that lawmakers could get into a real, vicious, nationally infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gold time and again into enacting crazed, pig ignorant copyright proposals because when the nations of the world send their UN missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts, they send health experts, not copyright experts, they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts because copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone. Canada's parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because of all the things Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below resolving health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French and English speakers, solving resource crisis in the nations, fisheries and a thousand other issues. The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the internet and the PC, the copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish and not a war. Why would other sectors, nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in, we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucket full of SCADA controllers. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal, it's a general purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software. The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial when compared to the calls for action that our new computer embroidered reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of radio are fixed at the time of manufacture and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and turn it into something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful software defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different software. Which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator, the FCC, considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software defined radios should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every PC should be locked so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by central authorities. And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open-sourced shapefiles for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives. And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers or the kind of thing you could do with bioscale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really, really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch, literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best day. And every one of them will arrive at the same place. Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs except for the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points unless it upsets us? And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general-purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find receptive audiences for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions or protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. And as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on root kits. All attempts at controlling the internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10-plus years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level. And the stakes are only gonna get higher. As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die. And of course, it won't be a hearing aid. It will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car, a computer I put my body into, with my hearing aid, a computer I put inside my body, I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. Thank you. So last year, the Lower Marion School District in a middle-class affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble because it was caught distributing PCs to its students equipped with root kits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times at home and at school, awake in asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSs on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will and not as traders and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. Now, we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the internet and the PC free and open because these are the material in the wars that are to come we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a council of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss and that means great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on. We have a chance, a real chance, and if we support open and free systems and the organizations that fight for them, EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRI, ORG, CC, excuse me, Net's Politique, La Quadra Tour de Net, and all the others who are thankfully too numerous to name here, we may yet win the battle and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war. Thank you. So either questions or long rambling statements followed by what do you think of that? Any questions? If you have questions, can you go to the microphones that are in the aisles here and just ask away? If you form an orderly line, we'll go, you know, left, right, left, right. So if you game this out all the way to the end, you end up with a situation where either the censorship people have to outlaw von Neumann and Harvard architectures and replace them with something that's not a universal Turing machine or they lose, full stop. I mean, and there's a big spectrum in between the two. Don't let me distract from that.   So I guess my answer is that the fact that it's not, that, you know, for example, the fact that there's no such thing as witchcraft didn't stop them from burning a lot of witches. Right, right. So, witch, you know, by the same token, I think the ineffectiveness of the remedy is actually even worse for us, right? Because this is like the five-year plan that produces no wheat that yields to, that yields an even more drastic five-year plan that also produces no corn, right? I mean, not, you know, this will make them angrier and cause them to expand the scope of the regulation, you know, the beatings will continue until morale improves as the t-shirt goes, right? So that's actually my worry. I think if they saw some success, they might actually back off.   Yeah, so again, like I don't think they are gonna ban general purpose computers. I think what they're gonna do is they're gonna say we want like more spyware in computers. We want more UE, we want, and not just like UE that helps you detect spyware, but UE where the signing is controlled by third parties and you don't have an easy owner override and all the rest of it.  We should admit it and move on.  We can't possibly admit defeat. See the war on drugs. Well, I'll answer you in a second because there's someone waiting there for a question. Right. We'll take a couple, we'll take, we've actually got quite a bit of time. Yeah, we do. Long-rambling statements are cool. So next question. Okay. Regarding the recent initiative by a big software company to promote secure boot on UEFI, do you think that on personal computers we will arrive like the situation in the, like the PlayStation platforms soon? And what do you think that we will have, have some means to counter-attack or to? Yeah, so the question is really, is UEFI going to be a means of freezing out alternative operating systems on the desktop? And I kind of feel like kind of technocratic, well-educated Western, Northern, middle-class people are always gonna be able to figure out how to get around this stuff. What I'm more concerned about, not least because I think organizations like the FTC will probably object pretty strenuously unless there's, you know, you can take the lid off and press a little red button to reset UEFI, which is what they're talking about now. But I think it's way more likely that repressive governments are gonna say any boards that are imported into our country, which will be most of them, not all of them, but most of them, will have to only run OS's signed by our certificate authority and our certificate authority will say unless you've got spyware, you can't import the machine. But we'll do think that it will be legal to reverse, to do reverse engineering, for example, to defeat the secure boot. I mean, that's an interesting question. I kind of put that to some people who were involved in the Software Freedom Law Center where they've been working on this. And my feeling is that that would be the right kind of stupid law, because it would be one that I think is pretty coherent with existing free speech and code questions like Bernstein and so on. And then it would probably actually knock back anti-circumvention provisions in most places where you tried it. I think that that would be the kind of case we could maybe win as opposed to some of the harder ones. So yeah, I'm not super worried about that. I'm moderately worried. I think if you are worried, the right place to go is the Software Freedom Law Center. They're really, this is their big issue for the year. So they need your donations at the end of the year. Okay, this gentleman here. Okay, hi. Don't you think that after the dust settles of all this idiocy over the internet, that in the end it will be something like the law of the sea, that you have exclusive economic zones where some states and policymakers will run wild with spyware and everything, and then you have more or less lawless common zone where there's absolute freedom because not only the individuals will need them, but also companies in the end and everyone else? Well, I guess companies don't need lots of freedom if all you want is incumbents to stay where they are, I mean that was the thing that freaks everyone out about Singapore is that there was this doctrine that said free markets brought freedom, and you needed one always led to the other and one required the other, and Singapore showed you that you could actually have vibrant thriving markets that also didn't have any kind of freedom and where you could have serious regulation, China too, I think. So I don't know that the kind of historical forces you're describing, companies will demand freedom, therefore we will have lawless zones are necessarily true. I think if there's one thing companies generally want, it's monopolies, not freedom. It's lots of regulation that gores everyone else's ox and supports their own business volume, that's always been the case. And on an organizational idea that you say, sort of in an international law perspective, let's say a treaty of the digital high seas, something like that. I guess the difference is that the internet is not the ocean. Things that happen in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, their light cone, to borrow some physics jargon here, the light cone may never in fact reach shore and if it does it could take a very long time, especially when the law of the seas was being countenanced when it might take weeks and months. The internet's more like a web, where everything that trembles on the web makes the whole web shake. And so the fact that something is happening in the lawless zone is unlikely to have no intersection with what's happening in the lawful zones. I don't know that that's a great answer. I think maybe laws that respect freedom everywhere that we can get them and using the internet to try to expand that sphere might be a better way to go. Got another question here? Yeah, the problem I see there is that we're looking at a system that is getting more and more complex but more and more broken on the way too. And not just the internet, but everything, the production of goods, of big companies. We have two producers of CPUs and maybe seven who produce memory. And so if Intel or AMD decide, okay, we just ship every product we make with UEFI with signed firmware, we're fucked. So the problem is that we are as humanity not able to produce goods that we understand and we can use as we want. So I think the effort we should really put on distributing networks and building our own hardware because we're seeing it, we have the internet, but nowadays 99.9% of the population think the web is the internet and they think Facebook is the best thing that was invented in the human existence. So we have to really break things down much more again and try to put out open source solution for every problem. I know this is a lot of effort and not really convenient because you don't have this great integration that Apple World brings you, but yeah, maybe just as a thought. Well, I think that Facebook, the thing about Facebook is that it works incredibly well, it just fails very badly. So all the things that it's good at, it's really good at, but when it fails it destroys your personal life or it allows all of your friends to be rounded up by the Syrian secret police and tortured and murdered or whatever, right? I mean, there's lots of ways in which Facebook is unfit for purpose, but we have to understand why people use it. They use it because it works well and if we wanna convince people that proprietary or difficult technologies are likely to bite them in the ass in the future, we have to convey to them its failure modes and that's the tricky thing. And of course, this is not a new problem to computers, although maybe the stakes are a little higher. This is the problem of smoking, right?   When I went to quit, my doctor said, you need a better reason than not getting cancer in 30 years because next week when you crave a cigarette, not getting cancer in 30 years won't keep you warm at night. And what I actually did was I realized that I was spending two laptops a year on cigarettes. And so I just said, I'll buy myself a laptop every year from now on if I give up smoking and I did and that kind of helped. But we need to help people understand. The problem that I find is that we tend to attack people on the upside. We say, oh, Apple's integration, it isn't as good as you think it is. Or Facebook isn't as entertaining as you feel like it is. And in fact, both of those, they are. I think what we need to convey is all the ways in which it fails that are not immediately obvious at the outset. And that's a hard problem. Here we have another question from the mighty internets. Yeah. Can you please say something about the difference between Europe and the USA? And if they are some thing of a feedback loop and driving each other in the wrong direction. So the question is the feedback loop between America and Europe or the USA and Europe and what direction they go in. I mean, obviously there is this transatlantic table tennis in terms of copyright that we've had before where you get term extension, an extension of the length of copyright in America and then Europe has to harmonize with America by extending its copyright even longer than America and then America has to harmonize with Europe to make its copyright longer than Europe and so on. But increasingly the way that that kind of stuff happens is in these really secretive and sinister treaty negotiations like ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership where you have treaties negotiated by European and American representatives but without any representatives from the governments. They're represented by, they're done by their administrations and without any transparency into it and then it's presented as a fate of complete and in that way I think that there's not much difference because they're both getting shitty laws in the same way now. They're coming out of the same source and they're not really American companies. I mean, EMI is technically kind of a British company and Bertelsman is technically a German company and Holtzbrink is technically a German company and Holtzbrink is too and so on and so forth. Sony is technically Japanese, right? Okay, we've got another question from the audience. Yes, so you had quite a few questions. I'm your rambling guy for today. Short, I really like the analogy of the five-year plan and the next five-year plan and the next five-year plan because I come from Poland and we know how the five-year plans in Poland went. So I have this feeling that those five-year plans will probably end up just like they ended up in Poland. That's where what you think about that goes.  Because obviously the drug war has been a disaster, continues to be a disaster and shows no sign of receding from its disastrousness and the difference is that although, I guess there are people who would argue that drugs deliver a certain bit of the solution to their own problem. In other words, once you've taken the right drugs, you no longer see the problem with drugs. It's, I mean, and I don't mean that sarcastically. I mean, I'll do respect to my friends on the drug legalization side and the idea of cognitive liberty and the rest of it, but it's not the same way that computers hold the key to unlocking computers because what computers do, what networks do, is they make it cheaper and easier for us to do things together. So in contrast to, and again with respect to my friend of Kenny Morozov, in contrast to the things that he says, I'm much more optimistic about what computers can do for justice struggles because by definition, people in charge have already figured out how to coordinate their actions. That's how they got to be in charge. So giving them technology to make them better coordinated is a small incremental improvement whereas people who are oppressed, by definition, have no capacity to steer the state and work collectively. Adding the capacity to work collectively to people who are at the bottom is a phase change for them in a way that it's not. It's a difference in kind and not just a difference in degree. And so I think that computers and networks allow us to do stuff together that we could never have done before and the more computers and networks we get, the more things we can do together with them. You know, there was this kind of tedious thing that happened about six or eight months ago, whenever I mentioned the word anonymous in public. I would say anonymous is a group that and someone would come along and go, they're not a group. And I'd say anonymous last week did and they'd say, anonymous never does anything. And I'd say people using the name anonymous did, well, they didn't all call themselves anonymous. Some of them called themselves LullSec and some of them called themselves Annie. And like on and on and on. And for a while I thought it was just this sort of tedious word game, you know, it's free, Libre, open source, you know, this kind of endless kind of correct speak. But then I realized that it was actually because anonymous and many other new kinds of institutions that we've seen in the last year are novel, that we don't actually have a vocabulary. There's something new on this earth, this kind of affinity organization that doesn't have the same hierarchical structure as even if there are pockets of leadership, their way that there are with anonymous or with bits of Occupy being spokespeople or coordinators, that it's not anything like what these institutions would have been 10 or 20 years ago. You couldn't have had anything on the scale of Occupy, you know, simultaneous coordinated actions in cities all over the world. You couldn't possibly have had that without a big sort of military style command and control organization prior to the network, prior to the internet. And so we lack a vocabulary to describe them. We lack a vocabulary even to think about them in some ways. So we say, oh, Occupy doesn't have a set of unitary goals, they must not be serious. What's interesting is that prior to this, assembling a big organization without first agreeing on your goals was cosmically insane because you'd put all this energy into organizing and then it would turn out that you weren't all there for the same reason you'd have to all go home again. And now what we can do is we can all get together and figure out the stuff that we agree on, you know, our minimum common agreement, our TCPIP of protest, and then we can work on that stuff. And then when we come to some stuff that we don't agree on, we can all go off and have a different Occupy over there to do that stuff because the organizing itself has been cheap. It's no longer the case that the job of an activist is 98% stuffing envelopes and 2% figuring out what to put in them. Now we get the envelope stuffing for free and we get to spend 100% of our time figuring out how to do stuff together. And so I do think that there is hope because the terrain is not the same as the terrain and the war on drugs. Okay, we've got like, where are we? We've got like 10 minutes here, so I'm gonna ask Corey. Corey, you've got like 10 minutes. I think that's like five questions. So why don't we take like three questions then I'll answer as many of them as I can. Okay, cool. All right, so on the right hand side, listen, I'm in here. Okay, so I think it might become harder to influence the minds in government in the right direction because we are sending mixed signals. On the one hand, we're talking about how they should chill and lay off the DRM and copyright war. While on the other hand, we are creating technology like Bitcoin or similar stuff that not, we don't beat at the money that the lobbyists get. We are creating things that are competing with the Reichsbank and the Fed. And now you're getting the government really pissed. I mean, I'm a big proponent of that. I mean, not the Fed but Bitcoin or stuff like that. So yeah, what do you think about that? Right, two more questions. Okay. Next. Okay, I'm not allowed to hold the mic. Sorry. Question was general proposed computers versus appliances. You said the threat is mostly by the lawmakers. One guy before went in this direction, I'm going. The problem I'm seeing is that we already do have this appliances. Even in this audience, people own iPhones and iPads. We have Kindles at homes. We have Playstations and Xboxes. The list goes on and on and on. So even we, we want this stuff because it has good features. You try to answer in this direction. I was curious if you have anything more to say. I think this is more of the problem. Okay, last question and then I'll try and answer them all in one go. Okay, do you think a movement will develop to change the moral perception of computing like there to make us feel bad about computing? And do you think hypocrisy developed among powerful people to say, well, when I was young, I programmed a computer but I didn't inhale? All right, so the first two questions, the question about Bitcoin and the question about why we continue to use these devices that even though they contain our own chains. In some ways of the same question, right? Because the reason that we use these devices is because they work and we're pretty sanguine about their failure modes because we're technocrats. We're like, oh, well, if they locked down my iPad I know how to jailbreak it. If I ever want to run some code on it that someone else won't let me, I know how to do it. I've got a runtime on my computer. I can take my apps off of here and run them there and so on. So we're very sanguine about it.  But that's not all that different from lots of other ways in which people tend to overestimate their immortality. I mean, I felt that way. You know, I bought DRM media once. I once bought thousands of dollars worth of Audible books over the period of several years and it wasn't until I switched to an operating system that Audible didn't have a player for that I realized that I was gonna have to spend a month running two power books all the time through an audio capture app to get all this audio books out of the proprietary wrapper and into something I could play back.  But I was also a smoker, right? And I also sometimes forget to put on my seat belt. I mean, there's lots of ways in which we do this and if we have to be pure in order to fight then we'll probably never succeed. I mean, we have to admit that we live in the world and we sometimes either make mistakes or misjudge consequences or just do the thing that's most convenient and that's how life goes. The question about whether or not it's wise to piss them off while we're fighting them. You know, I don't think they could be any more afraid of the internet. I don't think that the thing that they most fear is Bitcoin.  It's things like Amazon and it's things like automated high-speed trading and so on. All these things that are kind of legitimate Fortune 100 halls of power stuff that has been most disruptive and that has got people running around like headless chickens. It's not, you know, Bitcoin is just a thing over on the side. Anyone, the number of people in the halls of power who understand it is minuscule and the number who take it seriously is a fraction of them. You know, and that's even true of cryptographers, not just people in the halls of power. And then the last question was, will people in the world dare to stop using computers movement in the future? I think we've already got it now, don't we? Don't we have, I once gave a, I write young adult novels sometimes as well as novels for adults and I did the young adult breakfast at the American library, or the Book Expo America, which is a big Book Expo show in America where all the booksellers come and they have all the young adult booksellers show up and they have a celebrity come and introduce the three young adult writers who are there and our celebrity that year was the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. And I didn't know this, but Sarah Ferguson writes novels about how the whole world sucks and you need to shelter your children from them. You know, strangers are bad, video games are bad and so on and so forth. So she was introduced around to us and she said, and what's your book about, Mr. Doctor? And I said, well, it's a book about kids who play video games and use it to win their freedom. And she said, oh, you like video games then. And I was like, yeah, my wife used to play Quake for England. I love video games.  I don't think we have to wait for the future for that. I think it's here. Anyway, thank you all very much. Thank you very much. Kori.


Recent research suggests that Northern Hemisphere atmospheric teleconnections to ENSO and the Arctic Oscillation can be parabolic, which could alter the standard conceptual model of how water resources respond to climatic variability. The study applies an Achaiki information criterion-based polynomial selection approach to investigate annual flow volume teleconnections for 42 of the Northern Hemisphere's largest ocean-reaching rivers and finds that parabolic relationships are formally consistent with the data for almost half the rivers, including the Sacramento River in California. This article was authored by S. W. Fleming and H. E. Dolca.


Leadership is a choice, not a position or title. This is the main mindset that the Eclipse Leadership and Governance Centre wants to promote in organizing the Leadership Energy Summit, Asia, or LESA 2015. Unlike typical leadership seminars and conferences, the event focuses exclusively on exploring the concept of leadership energy. Speaking to 7 edition today, Eclipse CEO Rajiv Peshawarya said the centre has been researching on why there is a vacuum on leadership around the world, despite about 80 billion US dollars spent on leadership development every year. And we believe that the whole concept of teaching leadership is flawed. We teach leadership through competencies. Let's see what made people successful in the past and replicate that. We teach leadership through case studies. You can't become a leader by reading case studies. We try to make people leaders by copying others' behavior. Well, that's followership, not leadership. He added the centre, which is a non-profit organization set up under the auspice of Bank Nagara, believed that leadership is about creating a better future without giving up in the face of resistance. Why do people like Governor Zettie not give up in the face of resistance? When most other people would give up because it's so hard. Unless we stop thinking about leadership as a title, as a position, as power, something for me, rather than it's about giving, rather than taking, the world needs to understand that. People keep doing not only this conference, but conferences like this, programs, education, research pieces, writing, for as long as it takes to change the definition of leadership. Entering its third year, the event kicked off today and was attended by some 500 delegates. The two-day summit features a lineup of prominent international speakers, including Jennifer Bricker, an American acrobat and aerialist, who was born without legs. The notable speakers include the first neurosurgeon in Indonesia to successfully operate on the brainstem, Professor Ekka Juliata Wahjo Pramomono, and the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Whales.


And this talk and the following talk are connected. I'll be talking about the location data collection system on the NIMIS-3, 4, and 6, which were really scientific experiments that were designed for tracking meteorological balloons and buoys and so forth, free-drifting. But there was a spin-off called Search and Rescue that came out of this, and we began to look at it. My talk will be linked to Tim Sinkville, who's sitting here from the NOAA Corps, and he'll follow up with what I say on the operational part of Search and Rescue and how it's evolved and how they're operating the program. So, as I said, NIMIS-3 and 4 had a system called the URLS, the System Interrogation Recording Location, and NIMIS-6 had a scientific experiment. Paul Julian was the PI, and Vern Sumi was the co-I on that, and I was the co-I also. And I'll be talking about some of our Search and Rescue demonstrations here. So here's the URLS System on NIMIS, and you have to remember that this was way before GPS. You'd have to stop when you're on your phone. It's more complicated and sophisticated than what we had here. But this was very early on, and as you can see, we had surface platforms around the world. The satellite was programmed, each orbit with commands for each of these platforms, and the satellite would send a command, and the system would respond, and we'd get a range distance, and it would send a frame of data with sensor data, or as I'll talk later, with some Search and Rescue messages. So this was the URLS System, how it worked. Again, you have to remember that this was not real-time. This was some sickness orbit, so every 12 hours or so, we could get a pass-over of some of these things. But it did serve to demonstrate the concept. Here's some of the early drifting buoy data that we always thought was interesting in the Arctic. Two buoys were deployed here, and they meandered all over the place, and all ended up right in that little fjord. We were very intrigued when that happened. It must have been a down-willing or something that drove them in there. Here's one of our first rescues, you might say. There was a buoy deployed off Puerto Rico. It was operated by the North National Oceanographic Office. It was a very sophisticated, large buoy system. I don't know what it was worth, but it was considered very important for their work, and it broke its mooring. Of course, Nimbus was now tracking it, and with this last location here, we were able to steer a ship to it, and they were totally elated with this. It was the first time we rescued something. It was a drifting buoy, but it saved them a ton of money. I don't remember what the impact would have been otherwise, but it would have been tremendous to recover that thing. They were searching all over the ocean for it. We did a balloon experiment on Nimbus 3, and this was, believe it or not, that's the gondola that flew on a balloon. That little thing, there's our N10, and our box is inside here. That's not our thing. This was under the control of NCAR, and it was just to show that we could track a balloon, because that's really what we were setting out to do eventually. Here's the balloon package that we developed for Nimbus 4. This box is about 12 inches by 6 inches, and they flew quite high, a little solar panel, and we actually launched from Ascension Island. 30 of these went into the tropics and were tracked, and here I show a picture of the launch itself. You see the balloon in that package underneath, and this cart would travel along the runway at Ascension Island at the same velocity as the wind, and when they match, then you can let the balloon rise up vertically, and there's actually another pilot balloon here that it's hard to see that gives the indication that we were at the right velocity. And here's some examples. Blooms went up to 30 millibars, and here's some tracking data from one of those balloons, and you can see that they traveled around the equator, and they never seemed to leave. However, we did have a cut-down mechanism on the balloon case. They drifted over into China or some other country. We actually had to cut down some of that little path there. And eventually we got to the animals. That's a 25-pound package, and we aren't the state of the art. And we actually named that Elk Moe for Moe Schneebaum. And here's Sheila Scott. Sheila is a British pilot. She was a dame. I think that's equivalent to a knight in Britain. And when her organization approached us, it was as if the British government was asking us. So naturally we agreed to track her. And she had a little fiber-ass stack. Her goal was to fly solo around the world, and she was not the first to try that. But part of her flight was a flight over the North Pole. So she was the first female solo pilot to go over the pole on a little plane. So here's the plane. That's our antenna that had to be certified by the FAA. And here's Sheila's flight over the pole. At this point, I want to mention that this is just a part of her round-the-world trip. She went to countries all over the world. And every time she landed, there seemed to be a crisis. Not bad, it was bad, or the plane engine was overheating. There was always a crisis, and actually, you know, the reporters were there, and she was in the newspapers and so forth. And we started to worry about this leg of the mission because this was going to be kind of hazardous flying from here all the way over there with nothing in here. And by the time we got to Norway, the time we got there, we didn't have much choice. We had an astronaut with us giving her instructions, by the way. And then she took off, and my gosh, she went right over that pole as fast, as clear as we could see. She went right over the top of it. And then flew over to Alaska, to Barter Island, where the radar picked her up, and then she continued on. And when she finally landed, somebody told me they heard a sigh of relief from NASA headquarters out in Greenbelt. And she wrote a book. It was an interesting book she published with the whole story of this. So Sheila didn't need to be rescued, but she did have a code that she would have sent that told us that she needed help if she needed it. Moving on to Nimbus 6. Now, this is the Torley experiment. I mentioned Paul Julian and Vern Sumi were the quitsables on here. And this... I keep hitting that darn button. This didn't have the command link down that I talked about on the urls. These platforms, balloons and buoys, had timers. They transmitted one pulse per second. One second per 60 seconds, rather. And they were random, totally random, incoherent. And that time shift and the Doppler shift combined would enable us to have as many as 200 in the field of view. And the mutual interference, even though they were transmitting randomly, was so low that it was not negligible. And so the equipment that was on the platforms was obviously smaller and lighter and lower power, and Doppler was used here. And again, the main purpose of this was the balloon and the buoys. Now, here's an example. Here's a picture of our balloon package that we developed for that system. That antenna is a piece of mylar, and that's about two feet tall. And this balloon had been designed so it was non-hazardous to an aircraft or an airliner, a passenger airliner. And we actually did extensive testing of this to make sure that if an airline hit this anywhere along the path, a string, it would ingest the package and grind it up, it would be no problem. Fortunately, we never heard of any attempt to do that, and I'm glad it wasn't an airplane that tried it. But here's some balloon data from that experiment. Again, this was Paul Joine, and Vern Sume had this experiment down here in the bottom, and Paul was interested in this tracking data. And my role was to deliver the spacecraft processor, and I wanted to give some credit to Mord Friedman here, who gave us the idea for the processor that we used to process that data. So here's a buoy, an electronic unit, and that's about 12, 14 inches. And here's an example of a free-drifting buoy. I don't remember how many we had, but there were a lot of them. And you can see the drog would be dropped down and that would capture the subsurface current, and that's how the buoy would be propelled, and we would track the free-drifting buoy. And here's an example of what the buoy looked like. Ron Browning mentioned the double eagle in his talk. This was a real rescue. This was our first real rescue. Three fellows were going to attempt to cross the Atlantic in a balloon, an air balloon from here, Cape Code, all the way over to Paris. The flight should have taken them like that. And they got caught in this circulation here, and they had to be rescued. They sent the code. We had a code in the package, and they sent it.  That's the gondola that was suspended below the balloon, and it floated, fortunately. And so there were three men in there that were rescued because of data. So that was kind of setting the stage for the technology that was evolving there. This is the same experiment. I talked about the fact that we had to rescue them there, but they didn't give up. And they tried it again, and here they finally got the arc right, and they landed in Paris.  Here's another interesting experiment we did, headed towards Fish and Rescue. This fellow's name was Naomi Uemura, a Japanese explorer, and he was going to... Well, he did. He took a dog sled. He took a dog sled over Greenland, all the way across from north to south as a solo, and he was collecting scientific data along the way, and there's our antenna. And it was... I don't remember the exact duration, but he had to be resupplied with food and other things. And the way that worked is he had a pilot. A Canadian pilot would take our position that we had and start flying towards that position, and eventually he'd come into radio contact with Naomi, and what would happen is Naomi would watch the dogs, the dogs that would hear the aircraft before he did. So he would tell the pilot where the dogs were looking, and then the pilot would use that heading in our location to zoom in on them, and he came right in. So he had the satellite and the human and the dogs all working together. And it worked very well. But he didn't have to be rescued. He never used the code. This is the list of experiments that we had on that... There were 49 of them. These are some prominent scientists in here. And at the end of the Nimbus 7 tourally experiment, this list was sent over to NOAA. NOAA was getting ready to launch the Argos system, which is an operational version of what we just talked about. And it led them into the operation field. So most of those users that we indoctrinated and showed how to treat the data joined Argos. And of course this is still running today, as far as I know. And in 04, when I last showed this data, they had 400 programs and a lot of platforms on the earth. They were charging for it. This was operational, but it was a non-profit. It wasn't a profitable organization here. And eventually, they began experimenting with the use of GPS when it finally came along. So it was a very successful program and that laid the basis for the following. So here's the evolution of some of that technology. You married that 25-pound pack as well. Now they got smaller. And here's a polar bear. These are from Argos now. And they even got the birds. And they still do birds. Here's the evolution. Here's the concept that starts that. I have to give Bill Reddy some credit here for this because this was not an easy program to sell. You might think Search and Rescue is so noble and so beneficial that you could easily sell it. But we had a heck of a time. We wouldn't believe the things we were told of it. And I'll mention it later. But this is the Coast Masses of Russia. And this program eventually had the U.S., France, Canada and Russia, four countries. And Bill gets credit for working that whole community, including NASA headquarters, by the way, in order to pull this together. It was not easy to sell, as I mentioned. Bill and Bernie Trudell and myself. Bernie and I worked for Bill at that time. And we went to headquarters after a year of developing this plan and presented it and we were told to go home. NASA was not going to be buying a system to save people that can afford to buy their own airplane. That's what we were told. We were devastated. And then all of a sudden, Senator Hale Boggs from Mississippi, a real close, powerful guy, was lost in Alaska and didn't have any transmitter. And all of a sudden, we got called back to headquarters. And from that on, we had a program. In 1985, and again, I mentioned these countries. Today, well, when I showed this chart 10 years ago at the 40th, there were 38 countries in the program. There's probably more than that now. This is the number where they gave me at that time. And I think what's happening now is you'll hear from me from Tim. The GPS and geostationary satellites are now taken over. We had the polar orbit with the time delay between the passes, 12 hours. And this, of course, gives you real time. So in order to help promote that system, we made these bumper stickers and encouraged people to help support our program.


It's Wednesday. It's 11 o'clock. It's March the 17th, 2021. I'm Tim Apachele, your host for What Now America. This title is called Jim Crow Laws Back by Popular GOP Demand. We've learned in the last few weeks that a number of states have introduced over 258 laws across 43 states. That is a direct response to what I call the big lie, Donald Trump's big lie that the election was stolen, that there were forces at work in all these states, especially the swing states, that the legitimacy of his reelection was thwarted and the election was stolen from him. And that's the background to why we are seeing an avalanche of new laws being introduced by GOP legislation. Many of these laws are being compared to the old Jim Crow laws. Well, I've looked at old Jim Crow laws, and to some degree, that might be possibly partly true, but on the most part it's not.  You had to own property in order to vote. You had to basically pass literacy tests. You, in some cases, had to have your ancestors vote, and if they didn't vote prior to 1869, then you weren't eligible to vote. Things like that were part of the Jim Crow laws. But the two that were Jim Crow laws that I think are applicable to where we're at today is one is the registration process and how that is now being complicated, particularly with state ID requirements and owner of state ID requirements. And then the other one is basically access to the ballot box. And we're going to talk about that, and many things more, including the new proposed HR one in the House of Representatives, a new bill that not only address voting rights, but also ethics and government. So we'll get to that. I'd like to introduce my guests. We have Jay Fidel, Stephanie Dalton, Winston Welch, and Cynthia Lee Sinclair. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to What Now America. Morning, Tim. So Jay, we have 258 laws that are being introduced. We're across 43 states. And a lot of these states are ruled by both the House and Senate of GOP and GOP Governor. Most likely these laws are going to pass. And then we have between now and 2022 election to either have them challenged in court, which you know that process is lengthy and the appeal process is lengthy until it works up into higher court systems. What do you think is going to happen? You know, I thought about it, but you're right about the lengthy part. If I'm a Republican legislature or governor, and I pass these laws, and you know, the ACLU or somebody interested in voting rights challenges the laws in my state, the Republican, you know, anti suppression of voting laws and so many of them different kinds, like we're in a civil war, you know, over voting now. Then what I do is I try to hold up. I try to delay it. I take every step I can to delay it so that it doesn't get into an appellate situation. That way I have pandemonium and chaos around the country, which is what they're shooting for. They want chaos by 2022. They want to be able to, you know, upset any democratic victories. And it's really, it's awful. I can't tell you how awful it is because everybody will say the same thing. You know, voting is at the core of our democracy. That's what it's built on. The majority rules, but the majority is being perverted as it was in 2016, in 2020. And although I don't want to sound paranoid about this, I believe that it's in Trump's best interest to create chaos, and he's behind it, his base is behind it. But more than that, I believe the Russians never stopped after 2016 and 2020. And they're busy, busy about trying to foment chaos on these Republican initiatives to suppress the voting. It is remarkable to think that so many people in the country would like to suppress the vote, recognizing that all of the patriotic ideals, everything we ever learned in school was about it's about the right to vote. So I think there's another set of factors working here. It's not just the Republican Party. It's not just Trump. Somebody out there is using propaganda and the social media to try to divide people on this and foment unrest on the issue. You know, there's a lot of other things to discuss today, but that is the primary, most high priority in the country as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, let's look at some of the specifics of what some of these states are doing. Georgia alone has introduced 22 bills. Arizona has also introduced 22 bills. And some of the ones that stand out as a glaring example of why they're scared. And remember, it's not just the big lie that they believed in Donald Trump, but they know that their ideas, their platform, which actually they don't have a platform anymore. They didn't have a platform in the last election, but they know by demographics that it's a losing situation for them to win elections. And until they adjust their platform and their ideas and their policies, they probably won't have the demographics to back up the vote to win the votes. And so what do you do to win an election? The only other equation as one politician said is it's a zero sum game. And if we can't win on the basis of merit and our ideas, we're going to have to win on the basis of keeping the other side from voting. And that's what they're trying to do. It's cheating, is what it is. If you can't win legitimately, then cheat. And Trump has always cheated in business and in the presidency. And his followers are following him on that. Okay, well, let's look at some of the examples of how they're trying to cheat, because I agree with that exact word. One bill says that you can only get an absentee ballot if you're over 65, you're disabled, or you're observing a religious holiday, or you... And that's it. That's the only basis now to get a mail-in ballot. Any other reason is not acceptable. You look at Georgia and some of the stuff and they want to restrict early voting. They want to reduce the time that a request, if you are going to request a mail-in ballot, they want to shorten that and truncate that time period in which you can get a ballot. They want to reduce the hours of the election on election day. They want to shorten that up. They want to eliminate Sunday, which is a huge thing in the southern states where there's a high African American population. And the old adage is souls to the polls. And after people go to church on Sunday, they go and rally to the voting booths. And they want to eliminate Sunday voting. They also want to ban state college voting for students. That typically is a more democratic vote category of students. So they want to eliminate on-campus voting. They want to stop and same-day registration for voting. They want to stop that. And they certainly, in some states, it's going to be a misdemeanor if you bring water to anyone standing in line or food. That's my favorite one, Tim. Yeah, they want to make it as uncomfortable as possible and they want to discourage people to churn out and vote. So yeah, it is cheating, Jane. I'm glad you said that word. If you take the sum total of this, this chaos, why it's not just that there are these various disparate, meticulous statutes being adopted across the country. And they may be just a few people submitting them, introducing them into the legislators and just a few Republican governors who are, you know, signing them. But they're getting through. And what troubles me is that the average citizen, especially, you know, the Black or Brown citizen, gets confused. What are my rights? Can I vote? Will I be permitted to vote or are these guys going to stand in the way? How do I chart a course through all these obstacles? And I think the result is, A, people won't know how. There's so much. It creates this information, right? And it's going to be hard to correct that, you know, in the public conversation. But B, I think it's going to turn a lot of people either off or radical, one or the other. I think we have a tinderbox, a racial tinderbox. I think in Georgia, in the last election, the Senate election, it motivated people. And thanks to Stacey Abrams and her organizations, it actually incentivized people to get out of their chair and vote because they were angry that this blockage was taking place. So you're right, it could go either way. Either they're just churning off or they get energized and do it. I'd like to add one other point, you know, I mentioned before, that this chaos is going to exist until some rational appellate courts, you know, strike these bills. But that may take a year, two years. Well, it's only a narrow second between now and 2022. And query, this is a big question, will it get to the Supreme Court in time to make a difference? And will the Supreme Court vote in favor of voting rights? It's not totally clear. Remember, it's a six to three Supreme Court that they did the right thing on Trump's attempts to overturn the election. But query A, whether they will do that again here, because these are all such outrageous bills, but B, will it be in time? If they decide shortly before the election, the damage will already be done. Good point. I'd like to take that point and direct that to Winston. There is a proposed HR one bill that is to address election security and these type of ridiculous things that these states have introduced. And HR one, a federal law will Trump, no pun intended, but will Trump some of these state laws if they pass. And one of them is to ensure security. The federal support of the voting system will oversight of election vendors and also address some of these laws that are prohibiting those who wish to vote. Do we have a chance of HR one passing the federal, the House of Representatives in the Senate? Interesting question. I saw that Joe Biden is reconsidering something to do with the, you know, filibuster, which I thought was interesting. Just the mention of it probably is, which has pluses and minuses for sure. Really, it's sad that we even have to have this conversation, isn't it? This is like Soviet tactics to try and cow your population into not voting, into not expressing just a basic fundamental right. Here in Hawaii, we don't have this. We live in a free state that encourages us. In fact, there's a bill before our legislature that says when you register for a state ID or driver's license, it is required that you opt out of being a voter unless you are somehow otherwise disqualified. I'm glad you bring that up, Winston. Winston, I'm glad you bring that up because that is a provision of HR one that there would be automatic registration across the nation and every state. Well, ideally it would. Who knows, the Supreme Court might take this and say, these are state's rights. They have the right to set their own thing. Or they might say, actually, this is a right that's guaranteed across the land. This has been an interesting court and it's ruling so far with what they did with Donald Trump. So while I don't expect them to fall on the liberal side of the spectrum, they very well may view this as a conservative principle that needs to be upheld and maintained. It'll be interesting to see if that happens or not. Just the fact that Joe Biden's introducing it is enough for the Republicans now to oppose it. It's a chicken in every pot, but it's also that they have stated that if they have people being able to vote freely, they will never win an election again. And I think what they really need to do is take the hard look within and say, how do we need to move our party so that we can gain back the electorate, so that we do have principle conservatism, so that we can regain the what are they called the Biden Republicans or folks that would be appealed to by some principle conservatism. And maybe that will happen as Donald Trump fades from our memories as much as possible and certainly airtime. So I would be interested to see if the H1 passes or the H, is it HR1 or? HR1, and then it's S1. Yeah, then it's S1 I think for the Senate. It's a no-brainer. It's basic for democracy. How we cannot do it is incredible, but yeah, I mean, and when you're talking about not giving out water to people in a line, we got more serious issues to deal with. Yes, we do. We have to address Dr. Seuss in those horrible books of Dr. Seuss. And Mr. Potato Head. Yes, Mr. Potato Head. Okay, thank you, Winston. Hey, Stephanie, I saw you react when I was talking about HR1. Particularly when we were talking about automatic registration, I saw you kind of react to that. What are your thoughts about HR1 or some of these crazy bills that some of these states are trying to get through on voting restriction and suppression? Well, I thought Winston's points were just excellent.  I don't know whether we would have, even though it's constitutional and a marker of democracy, I really wonder what will happen if that's pushed as a federal requirement. I mean, that's the question there. So that could really rise up and get serious. I know that there's concern about all this anarchism, but also going along with that is the Republicans, as I was reading some news articles this morning, are looking like they regret missing the boat here on the American Recovery Act. So it looks like they're thinking all of their shouting and hollering against it is not taken because, you know, over 60% of the population is delighted.  So I think that they're going to be changing their tact from that. And they may have actually been wounded by that. I mean, that may have been... Well, I think it was actually 70%. It was even higher on the Pew poll that 70% both Democrat and GOP loved the idea. So I think you're right. I think it's backfired on them horribly. Yeah. Well, I wanted to just mention on the state, on all of these voting rules that they're trying to put in new new statutes and legislation that they're trying to create. I have a North Carolina background and I'm the cousin, a Dalton was Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, then he was running for governor. And then the Republicans came in that year and just swept the whole North Carolina state into reticence. And I was so appalled, well, not just because there was a known person going into governance at that level and had been in as the Lieutenant Governor. But how could the people there, because when I was young going there, I was taught how to vote. They were about how to vote. You go and you vote a ticket and it's not a red ticket. But anyway, all of a sudden this whole thing was turned around. And so this comes up again in hearing of these new legislative ideas. At some point, the state population has got to respond. I mean, it can't all be the state, since the state government has got its control by Republicans, can they really misuse the people to that degree? And that's going to be okay. So we can come in and do all these Stacey Abrams thing and the DCC can come in and do all of its work and try, I mean, does anybody need educating on how you're not, you can't have water if you stand in line voting. These have gone to such ridiculousness that they reveal, they totally reveal themselves. They do, Stephanie. And the problem is, as Jay pointed out, 2022 may not be enough time for the courts to get involved and say, no, you can't do that. And so we may have an election that doesn't see an opinion from the Supreme Court. That's what I'm talking about. My point is, yes, we want the court in there, they'll do it. But the people need to stop and say, wait a minute, this isn't going to work. And how, I mean, that was a majority Democrat state. And in these couple of years, it's been transferred. But how can these people be left with no voice? Do they really have no voice in these states where the government is trying? Look at what they're doing too. May I just say, may I answer that quickly? Stephanie, if the only voice that people have, sort of going to the streets, is to vote. And if they, if they can't register, they can't get to the polls, they're gerrymandered out, whatever it is, they can't vote, they are made powerless. And a lot of people will be made powerless because of the confusion generated by these bills. That's my answer to your question. Okay, let me. Johnson Governor tried to pull a lot of this stuff on people and they had to start carting in just, you know, thousands and millions of signatures. It takes that, I guess that's a good point, Jay, because I guess it gets down to presentation. I want to get, I want to get, thank you, Stephanie. I want to get Cynthia in on one of the concepts here. And that is a lot of these laws are going to require stringent voter ID requirements. Now, this issue intersects with the immigration issue. And it's not just Republicans that feel it's not unwarranted to have a proper ID to verify you are who you are when you vote. And, but the problem is many people and particularly a lot of older seniors, they don't have their birth certificate to prove their identification, to get that state ID or to get that driver's license. You don't have to be a driver to get an ID from the state. Here's the problem though. In order to get your birth certificate, and I do a lot of genealogy, in some states you have to show your ID. So how do you get your ID if you don't have your birth certificate? There's the conundrum in a lot of states actually, and not just red states and a lot of blue states, they have an ID requirement to get your own birth certificate. So do you think it's unreasonable, Cynthia, for these states to require a recognized identification prior to vote? Well, I think that there are ways around that. Yeah, like when they register and they get their signature registered with the main office, then that signature can be checked against that other signature. So when they go to register, the county clerk could then issue them a voter ID card. It's not an ID card where they need all that stuff.  You just need stuff that shows you live there, right? Mail with your name on it, things like that. So why couldn't they do something else to get around that? I know here in Hawaii, because I work the polls every year, and I know here in Hawaii, we require ID. When people come to sign in, I take their ID and check it to see, make sure it's them. So I don't think it's that outrageous to expect the person voting to show that they are that person. That's a legitimate requirement, I think, but I don't know as it has to be a state ID, like a driver's license or like a state issued ID. Can it be a county clerk issued ID that's only used for voting? Good point. I'm glad you brought that up. I think that's an excellent point. And I'm actually thankful you had the experiences in the register business for voting, because I think that's an innovative way around this, because not only is it time and effort to get this birth certificate, but it's also money, and that could be perceived as almost like a poll tax that we had during the Jim Crow days, that you had to pay a certain amount of money just to vote. Right. And one of the things I'm the most worried about in all of this ID thing is for Native Americans. Our focus is often in the news and everywhere else on the African-American experience and being the Jim Crow stuff. What about the Native Americans that have to have an address, a street address to vote? Now wait a minute. A lot of the times on the reservations, they don't even have a street address or a street name for that matter. Good point. Good point. They're trying to really alienate Native Americans in all of this also, and it seems to me they should be able to make some sort of concession there also and let the reservation be their address. Right. All right. Good point. All right. Thank you. Great answers. Hey, switching gears here real quick. Jay, we don't have too much time left, but I want to get your opinion about how you think the vaccination process is going and how you think Joe Biden in the administration is doing with the help is here. Is he getting that message across and is it sticking? Will he get points for this as an accomplishment of his administration in 2024? I think he's doing a good job, best he could, getting the message across, but there's a countervailing propaganda going on against vaccinations. 30% of the military don't want to take it. I don't know why that's about. An enormous number of Republicans don't want to take it, and you know the lack of consideration for your fellow human being is extraordinary.  Furthermore, I mean, it doesn't take a scientist to know that if you have a lot of COVID in your community, you're going to have a lot of variance in your community, and that's going to create a whole new problem. Europe has got that problem now. People didn't, you know, very reserved about taking the vaccines. A lot of people haven't taken the vaccines, so we get more cases, more cases equal more variance, I think, and I think Fauci thinks too, that this is going to result in another surge. So as hard as Biden is trying, he's working against that same sort of back channel thing that is happening in the voting rights issue. And they're fighting with him on something that is completely fundamental, fundamental, public health, fundamental, don't hurt your fellow human being. You know, before this show, you and I were discussing Fox, particularly Tucker Carlson, casting doubt on these vaccines and swatting Americans that maybe they're not, that's not the best thing for them. And the issue that you appropriately brought up was, you know, I said, hey, maybe the FCC needs to get involved here and say, stop it because you're passing on false information about the value of a vaccine and public health. We had Twitter kicked people off for spreading bad information about vaccines. We had Facebook do the same thing. And then you rightly so said, well, it's a First Amendment right issue. So how do we stop the Tucker Carlson's of this world from discouraging a known medical science fact that this is going to be effective against COVID? How do we stop these kind of people? And is there a way to do it? That's the problem with people like Tucker Carlson. I mean, he is testing the First Amendment. He's pushing it to its limit. And he's asking us, all of us and the government and the courts to change the First Amendment to stop him. Because it's disinformation. People are dying as a result of what he says. He has his own bully pulpit and query whether we are nimble enough to change the way the thing works. You know, what did the Tuckville say? He said democracy is tumultuous. Well, democracy allows Tucker Carlson to do this and it kills people. Is that what we want out of the First Amendment? I think there's a lot of pressure on the First Amendment for that reason. It's not only what he's saying, but it's the pushback to say, well, Tucker, you can't do that.  How different is that from this? Good point. I like to take that exact point and direct that to you, Winston. What are your thoughts about the Tucker Carlson's in the world, discouraging the use of a vaccine and casting doubt on it? Should the FCC try to step in and maybe it gets challenged and goes to the courts and ultimately to the Supreme Court? But is it a worthwhile effort for the FCC to say knock it off or not? Or is it just the First Amendment right and let Tucker Carlson say and do what he wishes? You know, it gives it oxygen the more you oppose it. So I think, you know, I was kind of shocked to even say it and not that I would want much credence to what the Donald has to say when he came out and get the vaccine. It's a good thing to do. And I think it was a yesterday or the day before his news. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. It wasn't an absolute statement. It was like what he said in Charlottesville. Both sides have a point here is what he said. Well, that may be. I didn't read the article because I don't want to give him any oxygen either. But I think people are going to be coming around to this. You look at Israel. They said, that's fine if you don't want the vaccine. You just can't enter a hospital, a doctor's office, a restaurant, a theater, a bank or anything else. What about an airplane? Winston, what about an airplane? Until you agree to participate and not be, you know, a sociopath, essentially. Now, I understand people are afraid of this. They think it's going to, you know, make them brain eating zombies and it may. It may. But if that's the case, we'll all deal with it then. But for right now, it looks like what it's doing is keeping COVID at bay. It's keeping people out of the hospital and not dying and not transferring this disease where half a million Americans alone have died.  How many people are dying from COVID shots? It's so small that it's, I don't even want to give it time. I understand people are leery of vaccines in general, but they were probably leery of electricity as well.  And that's the end of the day. If they want to participate in society, Costco will ban them, Sam's Club will ban them. And they'll have to get it eventually or they'll just bow at their while. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Hey, we've run out of time. So I want to go around the table and Stephanie, your last thoughts for this last week and the week to come or anything else you want to talk about? Just interested that Winston mentioned that Israel and maybe other countries, I haven't done the research on this, but I've found myself slipping into the no fly list, which is the no hospital list. If you don't have, if you have not followed the medical advice and recommendations, and it sounds like certainly commercial and corporations are doing that, they're requiring, like you say, Costco won't let you in or maybe Safeway won't let you in. And then also getting down to actually our medical people are exhausted and they're really starting to revolt in terms of trying to get some more pay raises and some credit for what they've done. They're not getting very far and they may just leave the profession. I've heard some threats like that coming away from them. And once there's not enough man or nurses and doctors to man, these are man and woman, you know, our medical facilities, we are really up the creek. But anyway, so I don't know if we get going to get that draconian or not because it does, it is a process and people usually move through it. And although they're always going to be diehards, you know, maybe with Biden and his, the work he's doing and getting around and talking about things is going to move everybody along. You know, maybe they understand the social cost of deaths and the impact of people's lives. Maybe they understand money more and it's cost $5 trillion thus far to, for these stimulus, COVID stimulus packages, and it's going to cost a lot more of this continues. So anyway, let's thank you, Stephanie. Let me, Cynthia. How about let's have the hospital bill. What's about that? Okay. That would be really interesting. Okay. Good point. Hey, Cynthia, last comments, last thoughts? I think it's important to have everybody make sure they go out and look into this joint statement from the Department of Justice and Homeland Security, assessing the impact of foreign interference in the 2020 election. Russia did it. China didn't. Good point. Thank you. There's a British intelligence report that just came out that I think is very important. And they have discovered a whole Russian disinformation campaign that is completely weaponizing health information to undermine vaccine security and to enhance the hesitancy. And it's totally just to, you know, separate people and to, you know, to further divide people. And so I think it's important for people to remember to look through everything, read it all. Right. Alrighty. I agree. We got to go. I'm getting the look. A long one minute. Okay, wait. This is a good lesson in leadership. You've just got to be completely honest. This is Dr. Fauci saying this. Okay. And I quote, you've just got to be completely honest and true to yourself and to your principles, even though you're going to have to tell people some things that might be inconvenient truths and inconvenient truths might put you at odds with people, but you've just got to be honest and true to yourself and not be afraid of the consequences. Once you're afraid of the consequences of telling the truth, you're done. Thank you, Cynthia. Jane. Yeah, I've been thinking about the filibuster. I've been thinking about the fact that HR1 cannot pass. None of Joe Biden's initiatives can pass. Short of that special procedure, you know, they negotiated procedure, but most of them don't fall in the category of that procedure. Most of them are going to have to have a vote. And under the filibuster, as it now exists, they won't pass because Republicans are sticking together. Mitch McConnell is keeping them together. Mitch McConnell threatened a huge war if anybody tried to knock off the filibuster. He's trying to intimidate Joe Biden about it. But you know, what I think is the filibuster should go. Otherwise, Biden won't get anything through and he will have this voting problem on his hands in 2022. And the Republicans may well take the majority, both houses, in 2022 and then where we would be. So he's got to get these programs through. It's more important than the filibuster. Knock off the filibuster. Joe Biden's idea about a talking filibuster is like, I'm not sure that's going to work. My point is it's got to go. The Democrats have got together on that. All right. Thank you, Jay, for your opinion. And point well made. Winston, you get the last word. It's a great point, Jay. And there needs to be some real structural changes. And if they can't be put in through getting 60 votes, but because it's just pure obstructionist rather than on principle, there may need to be more desperate times call for desperate measures. And if we're talking about the existential threat to our nation, we have to take that into consideration. The other thing, I looked at Deborah Birx in her interviews and after what Cynthia's quote just was, and as she was sitting there and she said, oh, I felt so like when the Donald was saying to inject the bleach and whatever, and I really wanted to say something, but I didn't know how to approach that. And I felt like she must be racked with an incredible amount of guilt. But I felt sorry for her, honestly. And there was one more very important thing that I wanted to say, which was happy St. Patrick's Day to everybody.  Pinch yourself if you're not wearing any green. Cynthia, you don't get to pinch yourself if you're wearing green. Thank you. Thank you, Winston. Thank you. We've run out of time. We're in fact, we've gone over our time. But we always do that because there's so much to talk about and so little time in which to do it. So thank you very much for joining us on What Now America? I'm Tim Apachele, your host. Join us next week, Wednesday, 11 o'clock. Aloha and happy St. Patrick's Day.


Appalachian Wireless proudly brings you unlimited data. Unlimited data is only $80 a month for a single line. Four lines as low as $200. Better service? Bigger savings? That's today's Appalachian Wireless. An East Kentucky network company. Get a speed slow to 25 gigabytes per line to 512 kilobits for phones and tablets. And 15 gigabytes for motors. See store for more details. Earlier this week, when students at Pikeville High School unveiled their empty chair project to combat the local drug abuse epidemic, they also learned about different community projects with the same goal. And one of those is the Needle Exchange program at the Pike County Health Department. Officials there say it has taken a few months, but the service is finally starting to gain momentum. It's hard to get those people in and have that feeling of trust. Like really, we're only here, you know, and stuff for the needle exchange. It's not that, you know, anybody's watching. We're not getting the information. We don't know who they are. You know, and we don't need that information to provide that service. Nursing supervisor Stephanie Bentley says gaining the trust of those battling drug addiction was only half the battle. It was also a challenge to explain the project to the public. I think the real message, though, that we want to get out there is that the Needle Exchange doesn't cause increased drug use. What it does is it just prevents diseases from spreading among people. And with the incidents of hepatitis C in our area being really high, then it's definitely necessary. The Needle Exchange at the Pike County Health Department is every Monday at 5 p.m. on the first floor. In Pikeville, I'm Shannon Deskins, EKB News.