Speaking of products that we didn't know we needed until we had them Ari writes in And says I know you stay pretty up to date on the automatic slash robot vacuums Which one is your current favorite? okay, uh I have a couple of favorites here. So I've tested The yufis from anchor the nido and the roborock. I've tested some others too, but those those are kind of the ones Currently my my favorites Are the the roborock and the nido they just seem to do I haven't tested the very latest from yufi. So Like bear that in mind and I probably will and then maybe I'll I'll add that in back to the favorites list here But you know the the roborock the roborock is if I had to then pick between the roborock and the nido I'd probably lean for the roborock, but I like They're both really really close Right now I'm running the roborock q5 And I think it's the q5 plus because it has the auto emptier thing which I'll talk about And then the nido d10 Which does not have the auto emptier and I wouldn't say you need the auto empty functionality. I I believe that was created for people who said Well, what's the if what's the use of having a robot vacuum if I have to empty it all the time? well, the reality is You we run ours every day It runs in the middle of the night except for the one in our bedrooms Which runs while we're having dinner on a different floor of the house But you know, we run them every day and I find that if I empty it once a week, that's fine It's you know, it packs the stuff into its little container. And so that's totally fine and at least once a week the vacuum is going to Pick up something like a cat toy or pipe cleaner, which in our house are also cat toys and You need to mess with it or it gets stuck in a corner that it shouldn't get stuck in or you know, whatever And so you got to pick it up and put it grab shoe lakes is like their stone tomorrow.  It's quite smart But I've got it in my hand I dump it out and I also take that moment usually a couple times a month to take either there They all come with these like specially formed Like little knives to cut all the hair that's going to wrap around the roller So I'll be like, oh, there's a ton of hair Pet hair or human hair or whatever it is, you know on the roller I'll clean that off while i'm at it, you know, and then I put it back on its base It charges and it's good to go for the next the next round But the the feature that really is the game changer and I've had vacuums before and after this is lidar navigation This is I will not use a robot vacuum without lidar navigation now It changes everything about how these things can work and navigate your home And not run into stupid things But that's creating a map of your home and sending it to china It sure is. Yep. And if the chinese Want to map your home If some bad actor in china wants to bother to get on a plane or even just ship the map of my home To someone here in the united states You can get a map of my home by going to my town's website for free Like the floor plan is right there. Yep So it really isn't a problem And it it I love it like it but it the lidar mapping is so much more than just having the map of your home But that in and of itself is fantastic because you can say oh clean this room. Don't clean this room Like on the spot. Yeah, you can put up invisible walls. Correct. No go zones It yeah, you could the no go zones But it also is seeing things and so like all those stories and somebody's putting something in the discord about You know like a vacuum with dog poop, you know driving it around the house or whatever That yeah, that happens far far far less often With these lidar scanners because they put pattern recognition into them and so they notice. Oh, don't go there, you know Well, I have a story about that. Oh, is it with a lidar vacuum video? May see over my left shoulder.  Sure. It's gonna be 15 next month and and last month she got left alone for many hours while we went to a funeral And uh came home to uh, yeah, it did the robo rock. I think it's the Six or the seven. Okay. It has lidar and uh, it apparently it didn't recognize Oh, that sucks. Now the good news is is we had taken up all the carpets. We are down to the barewood floors And so much easier to clean up that's way easier to clean the vacuum But uh, boy was that frustrating to see like oh man. I thought it was supposed to avoid that I did too. Yeah Well, there you go. But yeah, I these are these are game changing things. I I have not yet tried A robot vacuum with mopping capabilities, right? Like I think the eight plus has that and I've got one I'm gonna break it out of the box. Okay, and I'll I'll be ready to jump in on the next Okay, great. Yeah, because I I'd be curious to see, you know for like a kitchen area Obviously that that could also be kind of a game changer. So um, yeah But but I you know I there are lots of good ones out there We've mentioned three brands My guess is that the ufis with the lidar and all of that stuff are equally as good as the others I just haven't had an opportunity to test those yet, but um, and if you've got pet hair in your house Man, it's so much so much easier to stay in front of it when it's done every day Yep You know, you just aren't gonna pray that guy out the vacuum cleaner every day and do the entire house No way, no way and it's it's really nice if you're gonna have people over or whatever we can say, all right You know, we just tell it, you know from our watch or our phone go vacuum the living room quick and in 20 minutes It's done But you like your involvement in that was to tell it go vacuum the living room quick And then it just goes and does its thing. It's really nice waking up every morning to a freshly vacuumed house


5. Signs that your mental state might be shifting 1. You experience apathy Apathy is a persistent lack of passion It can cause you to feel disinterested in meeting new people or trying new things 2. You experience dissociation Dissociation takes on many forms such as derealization, depersonalization, and dissociative amnesia 3. You withdraw from your friends and family 4. You actively avoid meeting family or friends because you no longer feel like seeing them 4. You experience mood changes You may feel more sensitive, irritable, or critical 5. You've developed unhealthy behaviors Mental strain or distress can cause you to behave differently or out of character For example, frequently skipping meals or engaging in self-harm can cause us to be more agitated, engage in risky activities, or behavior adequately Do you relate to any of these signs?


Good afternoon. My name is John Bambenech. You're presenting virtually adventures in pro bono digital forensics cases on some Of the cases I've worked on in the last couple of years That I've had some time here for to work on some extra things. We'll talk about that here in a second As you know, it's all pre-recorded if you have questions and discord as as we go along I'm happy to answer them or send direct messages or if you happen to be in Las Vegas I want to catch up for drinks or coffee. I am I am available Certainly to talk about things that we're going to get at the very end my call to action So a little bit about myself. I am president of my own company Bambenech labs primarily selling Threat intelligence feeds, but I do some other consulting as well, but it's my company. So I'm fully independent for the time being I am getting my phd in cyber security machine learning But what's relevant for this talk is I helped develop a curriculum and taught for about three years digital forensics at the University of Illinois I actually don't have any current certifications in forensics, but I've taught it and have used that experience as my gateway into Getting judges to approve me as an expert witness because I've developed curriculum that others have used and some of my students have gone on to be Law enforcement officers and how I teach the course Actually, you'll see artifacts of how I present this talk and what I focus on So as an aside, right, I am in the lucky position to be self-employed So and basically a lifestyle company Some of you may be involved with startups looking for multiples and that kind of thing But you know when you're in a boutique lifestyle company, there's a lot of freedom that comes along with it to pursue things That you find interesting versus things that you just have to do because your boss tells you to do So between that and the pandemic. I used to be part of the security vacation club I'm sure that I've seen some of you Participants, you know around the United States around the world That we when we used to do that kind of a thing and not spending time on planes Especially for international travel has freed up a lot more time as well So I have more time to devote to non-income producing activities Which goes to my last point is that I think At this time in our society and the way things are going that we should get back and to use our skills There's we know like there's a cybersecurity job shortage and we could talk about why that is But more importantly, there's lots of things that there are lots of people in groups that aren't getting protected Right and not just even in the digital forensics or law enforcement sense, but You know, I've talked to PTAs at schools of parents who are trying to protect their kids And they have very little guidance. I mean, they can Google it You know, there's any number of groups of people who have cyber security needs that are going on met because They're just folk who don't have infinite amount of money to pay people And as much as possible, we should give back. Obviously, we have to feed our families and work But for the extent that some of us can do that I really feel strongly that we should Should do that and a spoiler alert at the end of this talk. I'm going to be asking for your help in some of this so Here's a one-hour talk in one comment that really underlines the premise of everything I don't know if any of you've seen this before you probably heard the expression I actually come from a family of lawyers and judges. Well, actually lawyers judges and petty criminals So, uh, I was built for cyber security, but I also have a lot of legal Uh, a lot of inherent legal knowledge and grew up on what lawyer jokes Um, so here's an older one. You can tell it's black and white, right? You know, you have a pretty good case, Mr. Pitkin. How much justice can you afford? Right Is we have a very romanticized idea of the legal system not just a criminal justice system But in civil court too that hey, each side can find a criminal justice system That hey each side can fight it out. They've got their lawyers and you know, you you get to the point to see who wins Well, there's a lot more that goes into that, right? You know, I'm one of my own personal experiences spending lots of money on lawyers that You know a lot of your outcomes in the court system depends on how much resources you bring to bear And how much you can spend and not just in money, but in time and expertise so he's the agenda the talk you know, we're gonna talk about the legal system a little bit because Usually what I try to focus on and really beat home when I teach forensics is the legal aspects of what we're doing You know, if you're using n case or any that are celebrate the tools do a lot of the work for you You need to understand what they do but the things that really Can impact the case are things that Um Don't aren't connected to technology, right? There's uh, you know integrity of evidence and chain of custody some of these things that if you don't get right is There goes your case right then and there and then one of the cases I'm going to talk about does deal with specifically of integrity of evidence Uh, we're going to deal with three cases specifically that have been dealt with and a potpourri of other kind of matters that touched on the legal system and Call to action at the end as I did uh mentioned before So there's a difference between incident response and digital forensics, right? It's possible to respond to an incident without really doing the work of forensics You know at a superficial level, right? It seems the same thing, right? How the attackers get in how do we kick them out? How do we move forward? The difference between iron forensics is there's a lot of overhead in preparing evidence for use in court now Very few of us has ever been called to a witness stand But the key focus of forensics Including the the latin origin of the word is That it's doing the work to prepare for trials and to prepare evidence Which leads to lots of overhead. I I can I can do incident response without locking hard drives in a safe Um, you really can't do that with digital forensics Uh, and like I said a very key point that deals with some of the imbalances inherent in the legal system is You know for those of you who are in discord I'd be interested to see how many of you have ever been on a witness stand After having done a forensic report, you know, there's probably a lot of forensic examiners listening to this talk That you know have written tons of reports But a lot of our work and a lot of the criminal matters I work on deal with overseas suspects Right, we know going in there probably isn't going to be a trial Um, you know, I've I've had clients and and sat them down I guess I'm not a great businessman in this way where I've said, okay You're dealing with ransomware. You want to sit there and try to do a tort case to recover Your losses or whatever is like, listen, we can do the overhead of doing forensics, you know I'll run the clock if you want But bear in mind we might not ever be able to get this person to trial or probably not so you're going to be paying me money, but I'm not going to be able to give you a return on that Um, so, uh, you know, there's lots of that that goes into it Uh, a lot of people doing forensics work for large large i r firms or rel resourced in enterprises You know, I'm not sure it wouldn't surprise me that there are people with law enforcement agencies That might be listening to this talk, but we have tools, right? You know, you've got an case or celebrate right kind of the gold standards of tools You know that you have to work with Um, I doubt very many there are no forensic examiners in a small business. There probably isn't a security guy Right, you know, there isn't there isn't a forensic person, you know at your local pta or The nursing home right the elderly have a lot of unique cyber threats directed at them Um, you know, if you think about business email compromise, right? A lot of people talk about ransomware But business email compromise or more more specifically rent roman scams There's nobody to protect the victim against the roman scam or to do the work to bring a prosecution And that's billions of dollars lost from that um And like I said, the tools do a lot of the heavy lifting for us I think it's important to understand what the tools are doing the science behind the tools That certainly is going to help you if you're ever cross-examined But it also leads to a degree of laziness At the end of the day like I said when I produce a forensic report I want to stand by behind all of it, you know, not just some of it, right if Whatever tool i'm using says x I want to be able to explain in detail Why it says x if i'm cross-examined because that's my credibility on the line, you know, I can't say well this tool said it You have to explain and understand the science behind it. We're going to talk about credibility a little bit more But this notion is that so very rarely is our work ever challenged in court Even if even if the matter ends up in court there can be a little bit of not laziness but Have kind of rustiness right we're not used to being scrutinized and when you know things aren't going to be challenged There you're not as on guard. You're not as thinking through the underlying stuff And in some matters it might not matter, you know, you may have it if you're doing forensics for an hr investigation of somebody doing something They shouldn't with corporate assets You know, but another subset of matters the outcomes really do have an outsized impact on on victims and defendants And we're going to talk about a couple of those So in the united states and kind of most of the british common law systems Anyway have this notion of an adversarial legal system, right and that's somewhat romanticized each side presents their case to a judge Or or to convince a jury or judge if it's bench trial Who is the trier a fact will decide you win or you win? Right and both people get their say they get to call their experts They get to cross examine each other's experts and witnesses And they can get court orders to compel evidence production, right? Sounds all very fair, right? If you're ever in a criminal case, you want to do all of these things, you know I don't want to just have the cop say. Yeah. He he shot that guy I want to be able to see the body cam footage or cctv or ballistics reports I want to be able to get my own ballistics reports, you know We've seen a lot of how this system works out and plays out in some of the high profile cases we've seen With black lives matter and others, right? Those are probably the most public trials that we've had in the past couple of years with Derek Chauvin and the like where You know, the police had their experts and their forensic examiner They're the corner who said You know, George Floyd died for x others brought in a different Corner or medical medical expert who then Said no, it was why right? So that's a system that works But only in a certain Case right the underlying x assumption Is that both sides are near parry? And it's not money necessarily money is important. That's a component, you know, but it's expertise Right, the only person who can question a corner is another medical examiner Lawyers may be able to ask some questions But lawyers need to know a lot of other stuff than just Technical areas of specific classes of evidence, right? You know, there are there are areas that lawyers are experts and they should be experts in and for that matter There's there's things police need to be experts in Beyond just the handling of a certain class of evidence if you think about What the FBI or police officers or detectives need to do there's there's a whole lot that they need to be trained and experts on And no natively versus us Right who are experts I can focus on digital forensics. I can give a talk on it You all can attend a talk on it, right? There is lots of police officers with celebrates and other tools who do the work of forensics But don't go to talks like this or don't have the same professional Training and experience that we do Time is a very important component especially when people are on the line and the people's lives are on the line and You know, they're looking for certain results in a certain time frame Or when the government acts and you know, you're on the wrong side of the the government's law enforcement arm There's also emotional energy right is We're going to talk about this briefly, but most cases settle Before they ever hit trial, you know, this is some subset of cases where there's a defendant So it's like I'm going to go all the way. I want to challenge this And once they sit in the room and they see their jury of 12 You know, then there's a recess and they settle right there, right? Because then it becomes real to them and that is an illegal question. That's just an emotional energy question But really think about just to do with the money question of what your hourly bill rate is if you work for an IR firm or Or what you're billed out at or if you're just a salaried Person who does IR on a company what you get paid now think of anybody in your life or that might have need For examining or handling digital evidence or helping with a cyber crime case. Could they pay? There's lots of small organizations charities There was a small media outlet that I helped with a ransomware case So that wasn't forensics that was that was just IR and ransomware negotiation But they didn't have any ability to pay and their insurance policy didn't have any room to pay me Even if I wanted to so there's lots of people who don't have access to the same money Or expertise or time or emotional energy So the assumption of this adversarial legal system where people at mayor parody Doesn't really often exist. Sometimes it does But very rarely does it right? And the bad news is as for those of us who work in For large companies or law enforcement agencies or IR firms is we're on the powerful side of that system Um, now generally the people we're investigating with the exception of law enforcement is You know, we're doing forensics for HR cases And it's usually pretty cut and dry Or we're doing forensics for a cyber crime or an apt case that'll probably never go to trial, right? There's parody there But that's not all of what exists there And there's lots of people who are on the I don't want to say wrong side, but the disadvantaged side of the criminal or the legal system I mean, you've got poor they can't afford their own lawyers. They got to deal with public defenders who have Case loads that if they were in private practice, they'd be disbarred for having You've got other disadvantaged people. You've got persecuted I'm going to talk about a journalist that the government that a city government just went after because they were mad Even middle-class people. I mean, we're all upper middle class here in this industry Um, I should say there might be there might be some entry-level people here But by and large, right, you know As a class people who work in cyber security can have a pretty pretty secure life, right? We're going to do. Okay But if you think about it, if you get unjustly charged with a felony You know a criminal defense could run a hundred thousand dollars. Do you have it? I don't Right, you know, I said to somebody who's who I said Who's had to have a lot of retainers on lawyers over the a lot of lawyers on retainers on lawyers Lawyers on retainer over the years, right? You know, I couldn't afford that and there's made at least a little easier in my cases that I have lawyers in my family that I can Barter, you know, they do stuff for me and I do stuff for them But the the hourly bill rate for lawyers for basic stuff is I don't know about 250 give or take Right, that goes up very, you know, those bills accumulate very quickly and that could be very hard for anybody to pay And there's lots of matters where you can't get free You aren't entitled to free legal representation, right? In criminal court, you need a public defender There is legal aid for certain classes of things But a lot of things you you may not if you don't have the money for a lawyer, then you're arguing the case yourself So Here's some examples of bad outcomes lisa. I think generally the fbi does does a good job with forensics You know, I have no beef with card examiners and and lisa generally if I were asked to look over the work I would expect that they probably got it. There's lots of checks and balances And how the fbi does things But sometimes they get it wrong And largely, like I said, it's due to things prior So this article Had to deal with with hair evidence, right is that the fbi labs, you know, did various forensic examinations of hair And we're able to get convictions based in part on that Well, eventually somebody who's resourced enough hired their own experts challenged it and found out.  They did but when an fbi expert shows up and says I did this I did this I did this You know They got a badge people take them at their word unless there's somebody like me or like you Who does the work to show that they didn't do it? You know is when Government presents their experts or one side presents the experts and the other side doesn't have any It is very very hard to impeach their work It really takes another expert And we're going to keep going to this point in a couple of cases. I'm going to talk about All right, so this is a very bad outcome You know for a lot of reasons is that one, I mean you had people who are potentially wrongfully convicted. That's bad, right You know But as somebody who wants the law enforcement system to work and actually put criminals behind bars Right, there may have been some guilty people who walk free because of the evidentiary error is made here, right is that I want My my cops and the fbi and law enforcement to get bad guys I want to get them the right way and make sure that they do it correctly Because the way we've calibrated our legal system at least in the criminal sense is You know beyond a reasonable doubt the error on the side of letting bad guys go And uh, you know versus keeping the innocent in jail It doesn't always work out that way. But like I said, there's an ocean. Oh, you got off on a technicality Well, the flip side of the quest quit that that equation is well did law enforcement do it right? You know, they have they have they have the high bar and they should have a high bar So there's also lots of other worst cases that we can point to right You can think of any of the cases that pointed to the black lives matter movement and talk and talking about a power differential there Right, you know, there's an entire project or There's lots of iterations of this the innocent project of looking at people just on death row Going through the cases with the fine-tooth comb and seeing if they're in fact people on death row who are innocent Um, you're right, you know the outcome of getting that wrong is irreversible Um, and there have been there have been convictions overturned it turned out that they found people who were in fact innocent for a wide variety of reasons Now the downside of this is also that well, I mean you've been on death row for 20 years You're free, but you don't get your 20 years back Right, you know, they're not going to execute you anymore But you've taken a 20 year break from society, right? There's no restitution I in some states you can get some money or whatever, but money is a poor substitute for time Um, a lot of the times, you know, the outcomes aren't just a question of malice, right? Is local police have to handle low-end cyber cases, right? The FBI has their thresholds not every cyber case is a federal case Um, you know, now they're police officers, you know, who can handle it You know, I'm in a somewhat rural part of Illinois where you know, there's a couple of cops You know who can do celebrate stuff and a couple of a couple of other things You know, but they have other duties as well But they've got to handle all of that and sometimes, you know, things that are complex enough or too complex for a cop but not Reaching the bar of the FBI's threshold means things fall through the cracks Right. Well, but those cops are usually, you know, not well trained, right? You know, they're the cops first or whatever Sometimes they have a forensic examiner who's that's their job is to do forensics on behalf of the police to not badge carriers Right. Um, but thank right, you know, many of you probably invested in a GCFA or GCFE Not cheap, right? You know, uh, would you settle for cop pay, right? When knowing your earning potential is high elsewhere Right. The FBI has a hard time retaining the cyber agents because they could spend 10 years And then punch out to to work for mid six mid six figures, right? versus The GS pay scale some people will still stay in for a sense of civic duty or whatever and that's great But it's known throughout government that, you know, the pay differential between the public and private sector is creating some real problems But I said, you know, we're on we're on the powerful side of an unbalanced power relationship and If that makes you slightly uncomfortable that's Not a bad outcome Hopefully if nothing else you get out of this talk is the the need to do our jobs correctly and diligently Even though we're probably never going to be questioned in court So My first case that I wanted to Bring up was I started doing some work for public defenders I said they have immense caseloads That wouldn't be tolerated in private practice They've got defendants who can't pay. That's why they have a public defender And especially when you get in rural areas, there's there's no money for it So as a personal anecdote the only criminal prosecution and I put prosecution in air quotes Because I think there's a couple of matters I was an expert witness on but but by and large it's Just helping research and investigate things and feed it to the bureau for them to do their thing But obviously like I said, I fed and dealt with the FBI So it's not exactly a conflict of interest then being a defendant against or helping the defense against the FBI It can get kind of weird, right? But doing state-level work For public defenders, there's no conflict because I've never worked with the dly state police or state's attorneys To help local prosecutions not for any reason.  So those are inherently federal Many these public defenders that's never had a digital forensics expert before but wearing their peers, you know So there's lots of things they didn't know how to handle. So it's just kind of talking through Okay, how to how to engage and and you know work with me And So I got a case right not in the county. I'm in a different one But it was a cesium case unfortunately Referred to by the national centers a national center of missing and exploited children Who does a lot of work finding this stuff identifying it on the internet finding who's sharing it who's uploading it And and getting these people brought to justice and rightly so right? It's I do no desire that any of this material on the internet anywhere in the world, right? And primarily uh ncmc there's a lot of hash matching sometimes actually do image inspection to actually look at the stuff And in this case it was tied to a specific Google account So they were able to inherently trace it to an individual This because they've never dealt with a private Digital forensics expert before right this led to interesting questions about evidence handling and you can kind of you know Picture the absurdity this is like, you know, it's You know, all of us doing forensics right now are primarily remote. So somebody's sending us evidence, right? You know, so they say no, you know You know, would you like us to mail the evidence to you on a thumb drive is like No, no, I would not because that would be a federal crime and you can't protect me from that And you can't email it either, right?  I really don't want to have But I defense are entitled to defend their clients and they need to see all the evidence and examine Uh, the fbi how they handle this is that that you know, if you've got a federal ccm case and you've got Defense attorney and defense experts. They're just going to have to go to the field office or a residence agency and look at the evidence there On an offline on network computer and that's just that Which is a pain But you know what considering the subject material, uh, the subject matter, you know, I'm okay with that, right?  It's like, yeah, okay. I get it, right? And and like I said, luckily like the work I would do with this case doesn't really involve me looking at the images I mean the metadata the files or whatever and the network telemetry sure But they really had no process in place, right here to handle it and I said they're federal questions, right, you know is you know Sending it through the us mail as a federal crime sending it over electronically as a federal crime You know possession in some cases is federal crime, right and state can't immunize yourself from federal charges, right? So Kind of talk through that. I actually asked the FBI if they had any, you know, there's the one de-conflict It's like by the way, this is what I'm doing. This is why I have it You know, which led to the the federal prosecutor given the prosecutor called saying hey, let's not do this so we'll try to Like I said make the work of law enforcement better in a place. It's never dealt with this is saying hey We need to keep this stuff in an evidence locker somewhere, you know At a police department and an offline computer so that if anybody ever needed to look at it to do the work they can But it's just not being Transmitted or shared it's it's being held in a very controlled way So even though as a defense expert, it's not my job to make the prosecution better At least for this is like glad we kind of went through this even though Is a very circuitous way of actually starting the case is like hey, let's Let's make sure we get the process right in this place communicated out That way when it comes up later, um, you know, it's handled correctly and it's very important to handle this stuff correctly so The nc m e c identified at hashes with upload events from specific ip's Those were authenticated to a google account. So kind of knew who they were Um, and as far as I could tell they just said okay. Well, you're the unit account.  Here's the charges gets a public defender Then here's about me and and contacts me So the threshold here right for a criminal case is beyond a reasonable out, right The defendant says hey other people have access to this, right? I'm not the only one with the password I you know That's reasonable people share passwords. They shouldn't I mean we we tell them not to but they do um Some of the ip addresses involved or locations not connected to the defendant right you've never been in that city There was mobile and isp, right? So It was kind of easier to to identify locations that didn't make a lot of sense um But here's an interesting question right as the the goals between prosecution and defense experts are different Right for a prosecution expert you have to collect all the evidence and analyze it to create a Beyond reasonable doubt scenario. That's actually fairly hard to do with digital evidence alone For a lot of reasons You know any number of things could happen to that computer, right? You know, even if it was in this guy's house Did somebody else put it on his computer or as you know into a cloud account? Because I can't tell that from network telemetry alone about who's sitting at the computer. You need other stuff and digital evidence is A form of hearsay, but there's a couple of exceptions that apply But can also be circumstantial, right? So there's a lot of legal concepts that come into play As a defense expert, right? But just a little bit different role that I'm used to is why I said I've done investigations of large-stale Crimes that led to federal prosecutions, right of getting to beyond a reasonable out A defense expert. I've just got to pick enough holes to say hey, you don't have it um Right, it leads to an ethical ethical question there is You know, do I want people with traffic and this stuff go free? well The flip side of that question is if you're going to shoot the shot to charge somebody with this kind of stuff You got to get the case um You got to do the work To close all the loops because if you're being lazy Um, maybe lazy is unfair in this case, but not thorough That opens the door to innocent people being charged with this kind of crime and it is a life altering crime um To be charged with and many people, you know, even if they're guilty You know plea out because they don't have the resources. They don't have the emotional energy. They don't have the time You know, the state over charges and offers a deal and says listen I'm going to put you away for 30 years or you can plea out here and take five You know, what do you want to do?  Uh, you know, depending on your age I guess I'm facing 30 years in jail at my age That could be an effect of death sentence or five years where I can get out, you know um Yeah, maybe innocent, but the process that you know That's the kind of weighing criminal defendants have to do and it's not uh, it's not as simple as saying, you know, what I'm innocent, right, you know, because Everybody's heard horror stories and knows that You know, the state wants to get you often they can and if you don't have the money to fight then you you got to take the lesser of two evils So um and and sometimes the best way to make prosecutors and police more effective Uh is to challenge them the adversarial legal system works because it makes everybody involved better Right if you're just talking and nobody's actually questioning you or otherwise Examining your your findings, right?  It's just You know, there's atrophy involved, right? You know, it's always better to have somebody Challenging you and challenging your your analysis and your biases and all the things that go into that and the more that I've done Threat intelligence and intelligence work the more that those kind of dynamics are the forefront of my mind Over 90% of cases settle out very very few actually hit hit court Of those right very few have uh a defense expert on some evidence, right like the FBI hair evidence They're not effectively cross-examined. You need You know an expert to question an expert You know and I said the system works where there's near parity It's better for all involved because it makes us all better, right? Having me questioning the work of police or the FBI for that matter is going to make them better Uh over the longer term, right? Um, so I I said it's an important that the system, you know works as how we idealize it Not necessarily works how it does today for a lot of people So here is actually one of my favorite pro bono cases for a wide variety of reasons and we're going to talk about this That was a pro bono expert in a state level cfa civil prosecution So like the federal cfa can be used in criminal and civil court california has another version of that The case is city of fullerton Versus friends of fullerton future. Uh, you can google that to to find materials because now that that case is resolved. It was fairly public for This kind of case Defendant was a journalist. He was a blogger Who exposed municipal misconduct? With an insecure dropbox account the city had an insecure dropbox. We'll talk about that I was connected to the case via the electronic frontier foundation. They have a co-op text listserv Where lawyers and others can ask. Hey, you know, we didn't expert Pro bono sometimes paid to help with something. It's a very low volume list but it's People have nowhere else to turn turn DFF. Hey, I need a technical expert for something So it's a good way to to pick up things every now and then But the case is kind of the nexus of free Of the free press the first amendment version of the free press, right Publix record law and using the cfa as a hammer against a blogger, right? I'm sorry for the typo So I'm gonna sure that many of you here Have some feelings about the computer fraud and abuse act as dy So the basics of this case Blogger did a foyer request for documents Notice the dropbox had no access control by no access control mean you move the root of the folder and walk the entire tree So for foyer responses, that doesn't really matter because we're really talking about public records. They're seeing other people's Public records request or the the responses to other people's public records requests. It's all public records governments are very Stupidly finicky about this stuff like oh if you request it then I'll produce this to you But if somebody else requests it then we've got to go do all this work all over again That's part of this stupid game many government agencies play to prevent the public from seeing their own government's business So like many cities this is this is where we start to get into hilarious territory, right, you know They produce a documents. Hey this this guy requested these documents Here's all the documents and the lawyers go through and say no you got to redact this you can't produce this because This is this exemption of the law They communicated all of the unredacted documents to their lawyers using the same dropbox account that was unprotected Yes, the communication would be privileged, right? Had they used any mechanism to protect the information? I mean literally anything Right, but they chose not to at one point. I brought up as like, you know what? This is actually a pretty serious violation of the california bar associations legal rules, right? Because you need to protect privileged communication and while your client may communicate stuff over an insecure channel Like making things publicly available to the entire planet earth You're you're the lawyer. You should be like, hey, no, you can't do that We need to come up with a secure mechanism for whatever reason they did So this stuff was all sitting on the internet freely available So Ferguson the guy involved published many otherwise redacted or unreleased records on police misconduct and other matters And as you can imagine hilarity did not ensue the city was quite pissed There was a public records lawsuit that was about to be filed So they retaliated filing a computer fraud abuse act accusing him of hacking the dropbox account Now it wasn't just a lawsuit. They talked about this in city council meetings. They're quite public They're quite public to the press. This guy is hacking our dropbox and stealing documents Very inflammatory defamatory language If it would have gone that way so They searched his computers his workplace and he's a blogger. He wasn't he wasn't paid as a journalist Which which led him to losing this job because I mean, you know If the police come in and start searching things because of stuff you're doing on your off time In employers will tend to frown upon that And surely the city knew what they were doing when they did that The city also hired their own digital forensics expert And I have that in air quotes because he was the living embodiment of what never to do in a digital forensic examination Right, literally his expert witness testimony is going to be case studies in my courses I'm going to mention this again of what not to do and what not to say in court, right The city didn't want Ferguson to access the docks They called it hacking an unauthorized access because they didn't explicitly Authorize him to use that part of their publicly available website I'm sure that your all your brains are all exploding right now Of this kind of preposterous druid logic a phrase that I tried to include in one of my declarations in court But the lawyer advised me that was probably too inflammatory for an expert witness report Right, it's there was no access control everything's live on the internet on a web page Right, there is no unauthorized access because there's no technical control to stop it. Nothing was gone around They also argued because Ferguson at one point used VPN I forget exactly which one he did that anyone Using a VPN service no matter the company was him any VPN from that provider was him For some reason anybody who used Tor was him and then anybody from outside the United States was him too I mean logical leap to logical leap to logical leap, right So you can imagine I'm kind of a I can be level headed, but I'm also pretty sarcastic I try to be level headed in court It was very hard to write my report based on how absurd some of these claims were I I don't know if it made it in or not But I think what no it made the cutting room floor went to the cutting room floor is you know They they make connections so tenuous Or a connection so illusory. They border on hallucination, right? They argued VPNs are hacking tools that if you use nor VPN your criminal They argued in one of their declarations I use this and I as as my own expert is that I use a VPN to access my campus environment when I'm a phd student to Access the network as if I run the u of i campus. I said well clearly that was hacking Even though the VPN was provided to me by the university for that express purpose This is the kind of arguments that we're making in court They're expert. Let me let me take let me emphasize this point These were arguments made by their technical expert, right? Who has it experience we'll talk about him in a minute Here is the worst legal thing they did the absolute worst They produced dropbox logs that they got from dropbox. They put it in their filing and said here's the proof They enriched those logs without disclosing how wire with what they enriched them with Until I basically tried to reproduce getting dropbox logs on a new account I set up and said they've added fields Where did those fields come from? The legal term to describe this is corrupting the integrity of the evidence You can enrich data, right? But as a defense expert, I need to know And have enough information from your filings to be able to reproduce your work. I shouldn't have to guess So when you sign an affidavit that says these are true and complete with no modifications And they're not that's also perjury um So it got into very legally Dangerous territory for the expert and their case quickly because I was able to reproduce and just like well Let's see what access logs and dropbox look like when I download them. It's like That's not what they look like. What are they doing here? They're adding more information and then they tried to play it off to the judge. It's like well Yeah, we enriched your you enrich evidence all the time. It's like. Yeah, you can do that But you can't not disclose it until you called out on it. That's not how this works at all So they're examiner right runs a small msp. Now. I want to emphasize there's a missing s from there That's not a typo, right? He is not a security provider He manages it's and telco and and help desk and nothing wrong with it Then doing it for over 20 years must not be terrible You know, but he runs an msp You look at his linkedin profiler ain't nothing about forensics in there We're at a bunch of books for john wiley. There's some network security in there, but mostly it related topics You know, but not everybody who does security can do forensics, right? There's lots of legal concepts Unconnected to the technology that are very very important like Let me think about this integrity of the evidence, right? Well, I said no forensics training that I could find is just some guy who knew technology We're really unclear as how he got connected to the case as an expert, but he did Um, so we've red flagged his credentials too and just says this guy is not a digital forensics expert, right? He may know technology, but that's not enough So which brings me to a note about training. It's like I don't I don't much care for the the gatekeeping that can happen with certifications and security generally Um, but it does matter in forensics, right? And then df really shouldn't be an entry-level career track because understanding the technology Is more important than being able to click the right buttons in in case you're celebrate, right? The most important part about forensics are are are not the technology. That's the law, right? We're not legal experts, but they're very specific things we need to be legal experts on right evidence handling namely, right? Because that's that's what we do. That's the service we provide Anybody can punch buttons in n case, right? But it's it's the the acquisition and analysis of digital evidence in forensically sound matters And there are legal ways to do that and less than legal ways to do that And I said the tools do the work But you need to understand the science behind it and that's a problem for cops is that they get to celebrate They get taught which buttons to push to to do things out And it works okay most of the time, but they don't understand what's going on behind the scenes and that's I mean That's not a criticism. It's like cops need to know a lot of different things then Sell forensics You know, but if you're going to engage in I do a high profile criminal prosecution You know, it's not unfair to expect that you know, the government needs to bring their agate The case was dismissed more specifically the city paid the bloggers to dismiss their own case I don't know if I've ever seen that right.  They couldn't give me money. Uh, this is an important note That I probably should mention right as a digital forensics examiner. I can I can do anything pro bono. I want What I can't do is contingency billing where I say give me 33 percent or some percent of the judgment because then my judgment And my analysis is tied to a specific outcome And that creates that that's kind of known to be a problem I said normally they just would throw out case Lots of questions about, uh, constitutional on the first amendment the EFF and the media groups You know got involved in the shoddy df work led to a very untenable position for the city to continue And I said I'm using this guy's expert witness reports in a class in classes of how not to do it You know, we have lots of case studies of doing it correctly I've only had theoretical cases, you know, examples of how to do it poorly now. I've got something concrete.  It takes a lifetime to earn and one trash report away from going away Um, you know, the only way to question the expert's work is with another expert Uh, and I said, you know, the the end day is like the city tried to railroad a blogger Uh, and he didn't have the resources to fight back. It took a lot of people who stepped up to to do it to help them out So my third third case is Um, if you remember charlotte'sville, there's a lot of related cases with dino bedal and tanya gersh with these neo nazi groups Uh that raised money in cryptocurrency for legal defense funds Uh, there's several different cases involved all torts. You did bad things. So you owe the victims money Uh specifically andrew anglin never showed up the court Uh, which is the first actual Testimony I've ever done an open court. That's because he never showed up Um, but he commented online and fundraised over the lawsuits so the court eventually said even though he was evading service He says well, clearly, you know about the case and you're just being a dick So we're gonna continue and if you don't want to show up, that's fine. We're just gonna have the trial in absentia Because it was in absentia though. They needed to go through motions. I wouldn't have gone through otherwise Like, you know odds are in a in a trial setting I would have said this is how I figured out what what he raised in bitcoin They'd examine whether it makes any sense to hire an expert and they probably never would have Because there's no one there to examine me. Actually the judge questioned me at several points of how I did my work Uh to to come to this So they needed someone to talk about how to Enumerate their bitcoin earnings. Uh, they also gave me financial records. So I was an expert for that piece of it And it was based off of twitter bot. I created several years ago to monitor neo-nazi fundraising in bitcoin So some interesting questions. How do you value bitcoin at the time of transfer or what it's valued at currently? Do you do the judgment in bitcoin at us dollars? This is all new questions of law and everybody's kind of looking to me. It's like, how should we do it? Well, I did it at time of transfer in usd. Um, it was just how we did it I don't know what the right answer is. It was just what I thought was best. I explained it and everybody accepted it It's always it's in bitcoin. It's easy to get those transactions And it led to a lot of adversarial changes of behavior. They're much more careful And nobody really buys them with their legal defense funds because they're not actually hiring lawyers So obi-dala got a four million judgment But judgments are easy, right? It's collection is the hard part where you've got to do the work to go find and take the money We're experiencing with ways to do that the simple matters with bitcoin But it's still very disruptive to their finances The bitcoin is also new. There's not a lot of case law there to work off of You know, we're trying to create some new case law Based on some technical expertise I provided and we'll see where it goes Um, and just random aside, I was able, you know to take my oldest son to drive out to a federal court in Ohio and see what this looks like, right? So You know, it's an opportunity of seeing the federal civil trial That, uh, you know, he's interested in law and politics. So I we got to see that too The last matter is potpourri There's lots of other matters that I'm working on a cyber stalking sexual harassment cases some other public defender cases poya cases I've got a couple of I'm getting on a trial experience or at least producing affidavits for courts But there's lots of stuff out there for people who can't pay and it just so happens. I have time But there's still more than I can do Which leads me to my call to action, right? The system is unbalanced against those who are not sufficiently resourced But there's a huge amount of need, right? Cyber stalking alone There's probably hundreds of thousands of cases right now of people who need help, right? They could just be locking down cell phones or Trying to move key lockers or whatever, right? I said if they can't pay they don't get help and there's no money to be paid with But we have skills and experience that can make big differences To these people in a wide variety of matters, right? And and I said some of these you don't necessarily need to be You know a fully trained df person, right? If somebody's dealing with You know cyber stalking or an abusive relationship, right? There are resources for them There's the coalition against stalkerware and A couple of other resources, you know, there's lots of technical help that can be provided to people Uh to help out You know, I said if you're going to go in courtroom, you probably want a credential But to help people To make cases even like cyber stalking or or sexual harassment. It's okay here You often need to have all the evidence collected to give to the detective You kind of need to do a lot of their work for them because they have huge caseloads Like what gets to the top of their pile versus what doesn't you know? If you give them 99 of a case and say you need to get this this and this and you'll have it, you know, you'll much You get a result much quicker for Your clients or the person you're trying to help So i'm setting up a 501c3 called cyber beast mode because it just happened to be a domain name a friend Friend of mine had had to collect refer and manage these cases to help the broader society You know, we'll get the organizational pieces put together. That's fine In the very early stages of it, I need people as willing to contribute some of their time I don't have to be a lot, right? You know, somebody could field a case here or there in in a city, right? There's there's one Uh victim i'm dealing with uh, who lives Quite far from me where it'd be very easy if I were physically there to say, okay, let's let's do this this and this But you can't really talk people remotely through Securing their digital lives. You could do some pieces for them You know, some might not be need to be formally handed aren't going to go to you know, the criminal criminal or civil court It's just helping people Who are victims of crime to get their lives back? So if if you're able to contribute if you want to help that this sounds interesting to you You can contact me my contact information is going to be on the next slide. I'm on discord, of course You can find me in las vegas. I'll be here until sunday. You can contact your local local public defender The electronic frontier foundation the co-op tax list Someone anyone and contribute right if the net result of this is that Some of you contribute, you know five hours a month to help make people's lives better And and in a pro bono way, you know, we're having real impact in people's digital lives and online safety And that would be a great outcome from this talk So with that I will pause for questions I said I'm going to ask on discord or set up time to you know, grab a drink here while we're in vegas I'm on twitter. I've got my email. I'm a fairly accessible person and Thank you for attending this talk. I hope you got some value out of it. I hope you decide to contribute and stay in touch


Γεια σας! Είμαι ο Ιορδάνι ΣτοΙΤΕΣ, και σήμερα να παρακολουθήσω τη δημιουργία που έχουμε κάνει στην συνεργασία με το ΒαΙΑΣ ΓΕΡΥΝΚ, για τη π성이 ο Μιουλτιτόκιο Εικενοδίου με τη δίπνη Εργασία, ουσχύ grazing. Οι εγώ, καλή αίσθηση, το Μιουλτιτόκιο Εικενοδίου είναι ένα κυρίο της δάσκας, διότι για να παρακολουθεί ο ασφαλήκας but και για να παρακολουθώ ο ασφαλής. Και η πολιτική συνεργασία που ήξερε στοτε το νομό της Ιορδάνιρες και την προστιφία του εργασίας που αντεβήθηκε, δεν πρέπει να σεμηλεί αυτά τα καθιλιά. υπάρχει μόνο σε αυτές τις κατάστασεις. Η κατάστασή για αυτό είναι ότι αφήνουν να αποφασίσουν their ability if they listen to focus on one acoustic source in a noisy environment while ignoring others. Ρίχνωσης, ένας learning-based speech enhancement has a great potential to improve speech intelligibility in the presence of background noise. However, in most research studies, the assessment of speech intelligibility typically involves degradations of the speech signal by background noise or added reverberation. However, in everyday life, acoustic scenes are inherently dynamic with alternations happening and overlapping between speakers that can vary both in level and in timing. To do this, certain ambiguities arise when trying to use different speech processing approaches. For example, speech enhancement, where we have the choice of enhancing the loudest speaker at any time or extract all the available speech content in a make-toot, also with speech separation where the limitation, the main limitation is that the number of speakers and amateurs should be typically estimated or known in advance in order to perform. Also, the iterative procedures can be applied but they're not the best choice for real-time implementations. Here we propose to use target speaker extraction, which is a recently introduced concept that aims to extract the speech of a specific speaker from a mixture given some auxiliary information. We define our research question as to how does target speaker extraction perform in noisy, multi-talker conditions, whether a single model can generalize to various conditions and whether target speaker extraction methods can improve speech perception of normal hearing listeners. We utilize a deep learning model that's based on the dual-bath, recurrent neural network architecture and we modify the last block of this architecture to perform speaker adaptation and fuse the information of speaker embeddings that are captured by a temporal convolutional network from an enrollment at the rest of the target speaker. So, given a noisy multi-speaker mixture and enrollment at the rest of the target speaker, we aim to estimate the target, the voice of the target speaker at the output of the model. The model is trained on noisy mixtures of 1, 2 and 3 speakers on the Librimix dataset and also we remixed the dataset in order to include more challenging and diverse conditions. Also, the enrollment atras were randomly drawn from the dataset and we followed the standard training procedure for speech enhancement models that are based on deep learning. So, here are the results on the clear speech corpus for different parameterizations of the proposed model based on the maximum look ahead time of each model. We can see that all models perform consistently in these conditions and provided improvements of the story intelligibility metric. Also, our model significantly outperforms from the recent state-of-the-art models the time domain speaker beam on the same task. To subjectively evaluate the proposed approach we conduct a listening test with 18 oral hearing participants that are needing speakers of the Greek language and compare the speaker informed deep learning model with a non-informed model and also compare these to the unprocessed mixtures. The models were constrained to a future look ahead time of 5 milliseconds in order for their real-time implementation to be feasible. So, conduct a sentence-accompetition test for 3 conditions with 1, 2 and 3 speakers as you can listen to the following examples. Here are the results for the signal speaker case where the models did not improve work-to-mission scores at 0 dB SNR due to signal effects. In contrast, both models improved work-to-mission scores at minus 3 dB by around 12%. We can see that both models improved work-to-mission scores by around 12%. Also, there was no significant difference between the speaker-uninformed and the speaker-informed model for the single speaker case. We have also observed that it used variants of work-to-mission scores across the listener for the minus 3 dB condition. For the two-speaker condition the proposed speaker-informed TPRNN model improved work-to-revolution scores by 18% while the uninformed model did not improve work-to-mission scores. Also, there was no significant effect of the target interference where we were assessed separately for our conditions. However, we have to note that different genders were always tested first or there might be a presentation bias here. The same behavior is observed for the three-speaker condition where the proposed model improved work-to-informed TPRNNN scores by 16% while the uninformed model did not improve again the work-to-informed TPRNNN scores. In conclusion, we demonstrate that the target-speaker extraction approaches can enhance its perception in noisy multi-token environments over speaker-uninformed approaches in various conditions as we have tested. Also, the target-speaker extraction models can generalize various conditions including different speakers' noises and number of speakers. Also, the proposed model is visible for real-time processing and requires only short utterance in our implementation it was about 2 or 3 seconds and finally, the current study aims to continue to the development of new assistive technologies for improving speed perception in challenging acoustic environments. These are the references of the presentation. Thank you very much for your attention.


Welcome to Hard Questions, where we gather pastors together to take on your tough questions and answer them right from the Bible. I'm Tom Hollis, the moderator, and today our panelists include Dr. William R. Glaze, Bethany Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, Pastor Mark Motor, Berean Church in the south hills of Pittsburgh, Pete Giacalone, Lead Pastor, South Hills Assembly Guide Church, Bethel Park, PA, J. Anthony Gilbert, pastor of another level ministries in the north hills area. Well, pastors, thank you for being with us. We've got some tough questions. These guys aren't going to be able to answer these questions at all today. No, I'm just kidding. They're going to answer them from the Bible, but we're taking your hotline questions. We love hotline questions. And these deal with assurance. They deal with drugs. They deal with the promised land. So let's start with this. That's the way I know they're so wisdom. Now, where does that so go? Is there like, is there like a, oh, I just want to know where it goes until he comes back for everybody. And, um, because my son had passed away, it'll be four years here. It's September 11th that he passed away. And I was just wondering, I don't know. He was, he was baptized in Jesus' name, but he didn't have a holy, he didn't have a holy ghost. But, okay. When I prayed, when I prayed for him at the hospital, we had people praying and stuff for him. And I told him, is this true that God knows your mind, your thoughts and everything. Okay. To David, you say when he can't talk. Well, first of all, our prayers and condolences to your family. I mean, that is a difficult time to walk through. So just pray that the God of all peace will be with you today and with your family. But there's a lot of different questions in there. And a lot of, a lot of difficult ones, but we'll start off with Pastor Glaze here. Yeah. Again, you know, we offer our condolences and I just want to begin by saying in Romans chapter 10, it says, if thou will confess with our mouth, the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God has raised him from the dead, thou shall be saved. And whosoever verse 13 shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. So in a sense, there is a, a means that when people get saved, that there's the belief in the heart and there's a confession with the mouth. But if a person can't talk, you know, God understands that. And so the fact that, you know, your son might not have been able to talk, the key is, is that he believed in his heart. And if he believed in his heart, the Bible says that whosoever shall believe in the name of the Lord shall be saved. He was saved. And I just want to assure you this, that when your son closed his eyes in death, that he woke up in the presence of the Lord. And 1st Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians chapter five, it says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. So your son, based upon his profession of faith in Jesus Christ, the belief in his heart that he is with the Lord right now, where that's where the souls of people go who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior when they die. That's great assurance of salvation. You know, and if I can just read that verse, we are, I love positive verses. We are confident. And then he has a another confident there. Yes, well pleased, rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord. We're confident. We're well pleased to announce to you to be absent from this body is to be present. I love those kind of, that verbiage. I love that verbiage. That's, that's a great verse. Yeah. I'm just diddle what they said. I think Dr. Glaze handled it very well and shared everything from the root to the fruit on that one. So absolutely. Yeah. So just one thing is that, you know, God wants us to come to him as early as possible, as young as possible. Sometimes people wait, they wait for, for to do different things. Let's not wait. Let's not wait until the moment that we, that we are close to crossing that threshold. It's the time to seek the Lord today is the day of salvation. Amen. That's what the scripture says. So, amen. Let's go on to the next question. Yeah. My question is, I've heard it preached that like if you live from the music that, you know, glorifies drugs or alcohol, or like if you watch pornography, that you let certain spirits into your home. And I was just wondering, if somebody comes and visits your home and those spirits are there, can those spirits get on the other person? Like, even though they're not listening to it or watching it and they, they're like unspecting people, can those spirits get on them people as well? Thank you. There is an unseen realm. There is a spiritual realm that is hard to discern sometimes, but the word has things to say about that, Pastor Jay. We know, I think one of the things that's important, always remember, devils can't just come and just do whatever they want. One of the things that I think the church could learn a lot from that demonic spirits, I think sometimes are even better educated on the where they understand their great attorneys. They understand legal rights. And that's the thing you have to understand. People say, why shouldn't you listen to those things? Why shouldn't you watch those things? Because you may be giving up legal right. You may be giving up your peace. You may be opening the door and the dev says, now I have access to something. So as people say, well, could a spirit come in now? Sounds like he's talking about from his standpoint, if somebody comes into my house, could they have that? Well, hopefully you don't have those things going on in your home.  If you disobey the Holy Spirit, you can open that door that whatever you're watching and the Holy Spirit would not be prompting you to get out if he did not think there was something you needed to get out from. So I think it's important that we understand it's not just, you know, if I watch something one time or if I do this, that or the third, that immediately something can happen. There's always legal ground. There must be disobedience. There must be sin. There has to be something that the devil can say, now I have a right to you. And that's why when people come out and come into freedom, they go back to denounce. They go back to repent. They go back to confess the word in their sins. Why? Because now I'm breaking free from the legal right that Satan had on me. So that's my little spiel with that. And I'll give a personal story. When I was about 25, I was in ministry. I was staying at a friend's home in a particular bedroom. I went to bed by myself that night and I had this desire to smoke cigarettes, which I never really smoked. It wasn't an issue. And then I literally felt like something was choking me around my neck. And I recognize that there's a spirit in this particular room. Someone was staying in that room before me. I recognized, yeah, they had some issues with smoking, with some other things. And so I commanded the enemy to leave. And the thought came to my mind, well, you didn't fast or pray. And I said, well, that's true. But Jesus did. And I take authority over you in Jesus' name. I felt it a second time. I literally felt like there were hands around my neck. So I walked over to the door. Not that you have to do this, but I opened the door.  I stayed there several more days, never had an issue. If you're a believer and you know your authority, you recognize even in the devil's presence, the presence of Jesus is always great. Well, I love that, Mark. Again, to take off on what you said, Jay, is the Spirit of God telling us to get out or take authority, you know, and in that instance, that's what you did. It's strange to me that a room could hold a presence or something, though. I don't I don't know where, you know, whether that is definitely in scripture, but it's in your experience. It was in my experience, for sure. Yeah, any past glace.  And I'll just say this in First John 4-4. It says, greater is he that's in you than he that's in the world.   He's greater than any demon. So, you know, no demon can attach themselves to you when you've got the Holy Spirit living in you. Yeah, I'm worried about us walking in there. It's like, hey, Mark's coming in here. It's going to be trouble. Years ago, I was the chauffeur for David Duplace, Mr. Pentecost. And that was the time when Pigs in the Parlor, the book Pigs in the Parlor came out. And it was really, really bothering me. And I had David Duplace to myself because I was his driver.  He was the type of guy when he talked to you.  He leaned over to me. He said, son, let me, let me share this with you. Because it was, it was the whole idea of demons attacking Christians. He said, my Bible tells me, and I'll never forget it. He said it was such authority. My Bible tells me that when they took the blood and put it over the doorpost that that blood was able to keep the death angel away from him. And then he leaned, and he put his hand on my heart. And he said, how much more when the blood of Christ has been applied for the believer we have, we are saturated with the blood of Christ.  It chills over here. That's good. Thank you, pastors. And thank you for the question. Well, coming up in 60 seconds, we ask, are we to pray the Old Testament promises for our lives today? Welcome back to the show. We're taking your calls from our hard questions hotline. Now, if you would like to leave us your question, you can call us at<PHONE_NUMBER>. We'd love to hear your question on the air. So please give us a call. We love getting everyone's questions. So let's go on to our next one. Yeah, my name is Joe. And I have a question. Why did Jesus instruct the disciples when they send them out to proclaim the word, not to ask for money, but if it was offered accepted? Thank you. Okay. I hope this isn't a loaded question or something here, but let's go ahead, Pete. All right. It's Luke chapter 9, verses 1-5. Then he called his 12 disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons and cured diseases. He sent them to preach the kingdom of God, to heal the sick, and he said to them, take nothing for your journey. But without faith, it's impossible to please God for they that come to him must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. God is telling them that money must not be the issue. Money must not be your total dependency. When I was at Walnut Grove, I was in the prime of my life and church was paid off. I was making a handsome salary. God spoke to me and said, it's time to resign. And I said, where am I going? He said the evangelistic field. I don't know. And I argued with God for months. But finally I gave in. I had missionaries come and yell at me. Robert Owen pulled me aside privately. He said, I, man, do you know what you're doing? I said, no, I never know what I'm doing. But I know I heard from God. And you know what? We did not have a table. We had nothing to sell. I had no books to sell, no tapes to sell. That seven years, God provided for me better than ever. And I never knew, Tom, because I had no price tag on my ministry, I never knew what I was going to get from week to week. But from that, you can ask Elaine, never did we make less, never did we have more. And Jay, I know that's true for your life, too, when you see the times that you've stepped out in the face. So I believe this was a testing element for them. Take note, don't take an extra baggage or anything like that. Trust me. And I believe God's calling us back to that place. He's calling the church back to the place and individual believers that He's calling the church back to the place. And individual believers that He must be our complete trust. And I believe that's a word of knowledge right now for many people who are watching, that God is calling us to trust Him like never before. That's such a good point and such an important lesson to remember. What I meant by whether Joe's questions loaded is he asking whether it's right or to take offerings, period. That was my little take on that. But let me ask you questions. Well, and this is one of the things that kind of confused me is that Jesus didn't tell him not to ask for money. And that's what he said. He said here, why did Jesus tell him not to ask for money? Jesus never told him not to ask for money. He told him not to take money. He said don't take silver or anything like that. So I think that that's one thing in the question that needs to be corrected because to me that's a big part of what's being asked. And then if you go over to the Matthew passage, Jesus said that the workman is worthy of his food. So what he was telling him, don't take anything. He said, because you're out serving me. And he's going back to what Pete said, you're out serving me and I'm going to take care of you. That's good. And I think there's two things to springboard off of that as well because that's where I was going to go with it. He said, wait a minute, the workman is worthy of his hire, which means when you are blessed by those missionaries, evangelists, pastors, wherever they are, you should be making an investment. That's what you need to take care of them. You should be taking care of them. It's not a price tag. That's what I'm saying. Don't put a price on it. How important is this to you to take care of what I sent? And that's the thing. So that's where a lot of people get funny with it, but I think it's great. Seed, time and harvest. It's all about, hey, making an investment. People that live, like for them, well, you don't go to your doctor and say, well, hey, it's free, right? It's my body. No, you have insurance to take care of that. But in the kingdom of God, he's saying, don't you put a tag on it. And what I like too, the Bible talks about how Jesus said, when he hired a certain man, he said, go work for so and so. And at the end, I will pay you what is right. So even when men and women of God get it wrong, God has somebody else that will come in and make sure that they take care of it.  So he said, don't worry about putting a price tag on it. You just do what I tell you to do. And I'll make sure that you say that that command by Jesus is not necessarily something we all do all the time because there are times God calls us to walk with him in a certain area of trust. I'm making a trip to Pakistan in the fall. I'm going to take some extra clothes. I'm going to take some money. And so the reality is there are those times where God says, as he did with you, I want you to trust me in this. There are other times he says, take what you need, pack and go and preach the gospel.  They went out on a preaching expedition. They gave him five pounds, five English pounds. And he says, five pounds for six weeks of ministry. We're going to have to take the offering. And they're like, nope, you can't take it. Not a lot to take offering the whole time. And not only that, you've got to pay the five pounds back when you get back. And God provided every step of the way. Adam at the head paid. But it's OK to ask as well. So yeah, lots, lots there. Let's go on to the next question. My question today for the panel of lecturers is I hear a lot about Christians today praying God promises in the Old Testament like taking Canaan land, the promised land and stuff like that. Is God really answering prayers like that? Does it really come into fruition in Christians' lives? This is a great question with a lot of different levels. So thank you for the question. Let's start off with Pastor Bill. Yeah. Well, as we read the Old Testament, there are definitely promises that were just made to Israel. And they weren't to go beyond that. You know, when you think about the promises that he made to Moses and Joshua that everywhere your feet shall try, you know, I'm going to give to you. You know, so that was, that was a promise that was made to them. However, I do think that we can draw analogies.  You know, Canaan is entering to the promises that God has made us. So, you know, even though I think that there are specific promises that were only to Israel, we can still take those in a sense and say, you know, I'm going to claim this, you know, even, but I think to me, you know, again, this might come from my teaching background. You know, I think the key is the first and foremost and then to say that I'm going to draw from that and I'm going to use this in my life just like they trust that God to do this, I'm going to, I'm going to draw from this and trust God to do this for me. Yeah, I think that that kind of thing, to use that example, to use his example about entering the Canaan land, I've heard people claim that, you know, this, but they're applying that scripture to something current day. Pete, where do you follow? Neomyah, Neomyah, I mean, when I think of this scripture, Neomyah hears about what's going on in Jerusalem and he says, I said, I pray, Lord God of heaven, oh great and awesome, you who keep your covenant and it's not, and I don't believe it's so much that God needs to be reminded of his covenant because God is ever mindful of his word. But I believe we need to speak it so we become more faithful because again, faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God. So as we speak that word, that's how God provided for Israel, something takes place that we know that we know he'll do the same for us.  That's good preachers. Some people have thought, absolutely. Some people have thought that Canaan's land is a type of heaven. But I don't believe it is because there were giants in the land and there are no giants in heaven. So I believe there is a Canaan's land for us and God sets a table for us in the presence of our enemies. So that's not in heaven, that's in the here and now. So I believe as Dr. Glaze said, there are some analogies we can walk in because if the Old Testament was believers were blessed, we know the new covenant is a better covenant on better promises. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you think about it too, God gave them the law and all the things that he released them to go into the Promised Land to possess it. What did he do when he gave us a new covenant? Right. And he says, now go in and take back authority in the land and win the souls back. So we fight the same battles. So there's an allegory in all of that. There is a shadow and type of they had a Promised Land. We have a land filled with promises. We have enemies that we have to face. They had enemies, they had to face. They had to go in and take back dominion. And that's what we're doing. So it's just about being able to find out where the Holy Spirit is speaking. There are things that we'll have to face. And frankly, I have seen ministries where they've marched around their church seven times and shouted and everything. And there's nothing wrong with that. But it's interesting, Jay, in the Old Testament it was a physical battle with spiritual behind it. Here it's a spiritual battle that we live in the physical. So great question though. Well, coming up in just 60 seconds we're going to ask is the death penalty biblical? Stay tuned. Well, let's go to our next audio question. Yes. My question as adults 20, I think it's verse 13 says do not commit murder doubt should not commit murder. My question is should a man or a judge have the right or the ability to sentence any other man or human being or woman to death? It was also but it committed murder or whatever. But should they have that right and that ability since they didn't give life to anybody? All right. So let's go right into this. Pastor Mark. Great question. One of the ten commandments as was quoted was thou shalt not kill but the Hebrew says you shall not murder. And when Jesus quoted this in Matthew 1918 that's what he said. You shall not murder. It is not always wrong to kill but to murder. When it comes to capital punishment prior to the law God gave a command to Noah once he replenished the earth and the Scripture says God speaking if anyone take a human life that person's life will also be taken by human hands for God made human beings in his own image. So I see that God himself instituted capital punishment. I won't take the time to read it but there's a passage in Romans 13 4 that talks about that and I'll just mention this. I see three kinds of killing allowed in Scripture. One is self-defense.  Secondly would be war if it is a righteous war like we did in the second world war trying to protect the Jews and keep mayhem from crossing through Europe and then the third area is capital punishment. I know that's not popular right now but I see it in both Testaments and I think that we need to stand by the Scripture in this area. Alright. I totally agree. As a matter of fact in Romans 13 something that people sometimes glance over it says here for rulers are not a terror to good works but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good? And he says he is the minister to you for good but if you do evil be afraid for he does not administer an Avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. And he said for this reason you're also paying taxes. So the Bible shows us that we're paying taxes to make sure we're protected. People talk about defund the police. That's completely crazy. Please. No, I want police around because there's a lot of folks out there and I believe that capital punishment all those things I believe that's all a biblical saying I know we have to pass on everybody else that there are innocent people that have spent years in prison and they find out they're innocent what do we do if we're going to accept capital punishment how do we not how do we make sure we do not punish the wrong person or put the wrong person to death. Well, you know and I think that's where due process came in and I get frustrated with due process because if you see somebody kill people I mean we got technology you got cameras and everything and you see there's this person really need due process but you know I go back to and I just you know talk about the experience of a lot of African Americans you know in this country you know during slavery times and how that you know for looking at people a certain way or you know being accused of things you know they didn't get due process and they got the death penalty and so you know I think that you know again I'm for the death penalty based on Genesis based on Romans and in favor of the death penalty but you know I do think that there has to be due process that's rendered to make sure as much as possible that the person who's being accused actually did what they did yeah well the scripture is very clear on the basis of two witnesses the scripture is crystal clear on it so again two eyewitnesses so when you have two eyewitnesses and I agree with you you know there are a lot of African American people and not just them but many oh yeah many many many you know I just think that while I agree that that's where the scripture is I think in the process I have to tell you at this stage of my life I'm not in favor of the death penalty just because I feel like there's too much opportunity in our present system of justice for incorrect things to happen but the scriptures do say that so I'm going to leave this kind of open-ended here although I'm against all these guys and they know more than me so well at the end of the scripture I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go I will counsel you with my loving eye on you Psalm 30 to 8 that is important we hope you enjoy today's program and we want to hear from you email us your question to hard questions at<PHONE_NUMBER> have a great day I hope you enjoyed our answers today seek God while he may be found Amen