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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast,

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Speaker 1: and if you want to hear more than just this

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Speaker 1: highlight from the show, become a Coast Insider and you

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Speaker 1: can listen to the complete program, plus recent episodes about

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Speaker 1: out of body experiences, the scientific search for extraterrestrial life,

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Speaker 1: and biblical prophecies which may have foretold our current state

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Speaker 1: of global turmoil. So head on over to Coast to

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Speaker 1: Coast a m dot com and sign up for Coast

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Speaker 1: Insider to catch up on what you may have missed

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Speaker 1: from Coast to Coast. Now here's a highlight from Coast

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Speaker 1: to Coast AM on iHeart Radio and welcome back to

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast. George Dory with you, and of course

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Speaker 1: when you listen to our new segments. Whenever we need

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Speaker 1: to turn to somebody to talk with him about the

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Speaker 1: Internet and issues like that, we turned to Lauren Weinstein.

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Speaker 1: He's our expert. He has been an expert in a

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Speaker 1: wide range of privacy issues in many other topics relating

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Speaker 1: to the Internet technology, and we're going to talk about

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Speaker 1: a lot of things with him this hour. The next hour,

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Speaker 1: investigative reporter Linda Bolton how joins us We will take

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Speaker 1: calls with Lauren at the half of this hour as well.

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Speaker 1: Welcome back. It's fun to always have you a little

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Speaker 1: longer than a couple of minute news segment. Law good evening, sir, Yes,

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Speaker 1: it's always good to be able to get to a

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Speaker 1: little more depth times. First of all, reaction to the

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Speaker 1: President and his constant Twitter attacks. What do you think?

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Speaker 1: I think he obviously assumes that that's doing him some

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Speaker 1: good politically. Um, it's not clear how much good it's

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Speaker 1: doing him legally, and it certainly distracts the news cycles

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Speaker 1: in ways that may not be to his benefit in

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Speaker 1: the long run. It's it's a very strange kind of thing. Um,

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Speaker 1: I assume that there's a there's a method to this.

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Speaker 1: But he seems to be concerned. He you know, he

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Speaker 1: gets upset that the internet is focusing on the last

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Speaker 1: thing he has said instead of perhaps good economic news.

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Speaker 1: But he's the president of the United States, and you

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Speaker 1: really have to assume that people are going to be

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Speaker 1: most interested in what you've said most recently, even if

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Speaker 1: it's kind of a set of kind of a loud

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Speaker 1: Twitter tweets at one in the morning, this this attack

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Speaker 1: that he claims the media is doing on him justified

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Speaker 1: or not. I mean, they've done some studies and they

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Speaker 1: see a lot of them are um negative to the

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Speaker 1: conservatservative movement. Does he have a point here? It's it's

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Speaker 1: really a difficult situation because what has happened is there's

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Speaker 1: there's a lot of information and a lot of discussion

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Speaker 1: that goes further than conservative and it's kind of gotten

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Speaker 1: rolled into all of this. So I don't think it's

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Speaker 1: you know, I don't consider myself to be an expert

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Speaker 1: on conservatives. I would never make such a claim. But

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Speaker 1: I don't think it's good for the conservative movement to,

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Speaker 1: for example, be believed to be assumed to be in

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Speaker 1: the same league with some of these extreme far right

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Speaker 1: people who are clearly racists and anti Semites and of

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Speaker 1: the sort that have been around this country since well

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Speaker 1: before the Civil War. I don't think that's good for conservatives,

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Speaker 1: economic conservatives, even social conservatives to necessarily be seen to

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Speaker 1: be in bed with some of those extremists. Now that's

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Speaker 1: their choice to make, of course, but if they do that,

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Speaker 1: then if not, it shouldn't be a surprise that the

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Speaker 1: media portrays that, because that's what the media sees happening.

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Speaker 1: The Internet is a very powerful tool. There's concern that

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Speaker 1: the Chinese are hacking, that the Russians are hacking, that

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Speaker 1: they can get into election booths. I remember a few

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Speaker 1: years ago I was talking with Beb Harris, who brought

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Speaker 1: us the black box voting stories, about the possibility of

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Speaker 1: hacking into some of these election boxes. What's what's the

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Speaker 1: latest you hear these days? Lur It seems like a

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Speaker 1: lot of countries are are plowing full, full steam ahead

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Speaker 1: into electronic voting disasters. There. It is so um just

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Speaker 1: seductive to be able to let people vote from their

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Speaker 1: from their computers or or or from electronic systems that

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Speaker 1: can't be well audited. Uh. And the really horrible part

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Speaker 1: about this is that that they'll say, well, we don't

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Speaker 1: you know, there has never been a successful hack attack

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Speaker 1: of our of our election system. Well, what they really

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Speaker 1: should say is there's never been a successful attack that

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Speaker 1: they detected. Because the thing about an election system, if

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Speaker 1: you don't have a paper trail, for example, you don't

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Speaker 1: know you don't know, I mean, you get you get

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Speaker 1: the results and you say, okay, this person one, and

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Speaker 1: there's there could be somebody sitting in China somewhere just

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Speaker 1: chuckling madly saying, well, we pulled another one over on them.

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Speaker 1: Social media. Let's talk about what's going on here. I mean,

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Speaker 1: they're getting more and more powerful Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram. Um. Demographically,

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Speaker 1: more younger people are using those social media than older folks,

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Speaker 1: but a lot of older folks are using Facebook and

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Speaker 1: things like that as well. There are there are older

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Speaker 1: people who depend on social media for their for their connection,

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Speaker 1: for their lifelines. Now people that live older people that

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Speaker 1: live alone. Uh, there's there's a tremendous this is this

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Speaker 1: is kind of something that that isn't really realized how

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Speaker 1: many older people are are very active and informed users

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Speaker 1: of of these systems, and unfortunately too often they're kind

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Speaker 1: of left out of these discussions. But they're very important

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Speaker 1: part of it. Laurena, I want to get your opinion

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Speaker 1: on the so called haters in social networking. These are

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Speaker 1: people who will post some of the most horrible things,

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Speaker 1: challenging people, attacking people, hiding under avatars that you don't

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Speaker 1: know who they are. Uh, what's your take on this

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Speaker 1: and why are they so mean? We actually started to

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Speaker 1: see the first inklings, the first little shadows of this

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Speaker 1: future which is now the present. Back in the very

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Speaker 1: very early days of the Arpanet, when it was a

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Speaker 1: very closed community, and we had just because it was

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Speaker 1: mostly military and educational, it was defense department, and we

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Speaker 1: had mailing lists which which were the ancestors, the ancient

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Speaker 1: ancestors of social media now um, And every so often

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Speaker 1: you would get somebody like that and that, that same

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Speaker 1: kind of thing on these mailing lists, and we would

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Speaker 1: deal with it by tossing them off the mailing lists.

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Speaker 1: Back then, we didn't really anticipate because we didn't we

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Speaker 1: didn't know that that the way we were doing this

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Speaker 1: was going to be adopted to the whole world. All

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Speaker 1: these days later. It was impossible to know, um. But

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Speaker 1: even back then, it was clear that anonymity or the

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Speaker 1: feeling of anonymity as part of it. You tend to

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Speaker 1: if you're in person with somebody, if you're actually physically

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Speaker 1: in their presence, there's a whole set of kind of

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Speaker 1: rules that most people operate under social rules. If you're

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Speaker 1: talking to them on the phone, you're one level removed.

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Speaker 1: You're still hearing their voice, and you get all the

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Speaker 1: emotional cues and sarcasm cues and all those things from

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Speaker 1: their voice. But if you're just typing, if you're just

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Speaker 1: sending text back and forth, all those human cues are gone.

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Speaker 1: You can't detect sarcasm. Um. It's hard to tell you

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Speaker 1: how loud someone is talking unless they're you know, they're

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Speaker 1: talking all in all caps. How how what kind of

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Speaker 1: emotional emphasis they're putting on it. And for some people

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Speaker 1: it provides a really a really powerful cover because they

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Speaker 1: can sit there alone in a room and they feel

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Speaker 1: like they are empowered by the fact that they can

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Speaker 1: say these things, uh, and they feel like they have

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Speaker 1: anonymity in doing um. In a way, it kind of

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Speaker 1: goes back if you remember you remember Donald Trump talking

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Speaker 1: about the the guy sitting on the sofa, right, you know,

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Speaker 1: the in the in his mother's basement, that kind of thing. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's that's the stereotype. But the reality is that there

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Speaker 1: are a lot of people who feel disenfranchised and perhaps lonely,

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Speaker 1: and they feel that they have power in this way

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Speaker 1: and they don't they don't have to worry. They think

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Speaker 1: they don't have to worry about being found out and

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Speaker 1: what the repercussions are. Of course, in reality, there is

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Speaker 1: no genuine anonymity on the Internet, and anyone who thinks

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Speaker 1: there is and does things like that is probably in

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Speaker 1: for for some problems. They could really get caught if

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Speaker 1: somebody wanted to investigate the problem, right Yeah, I mean

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Speaker 1: there's there's levels of obfuscation that people can use to

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Speaker 1: try to hide. But but one way or another. I mean,

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Speaker 1: every Internet connection you make there's an IP address and

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Speaker 1: and the I s p s record all of this.

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Speaker 1: Um So in situations where there is is sufficient reason

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Speaker 1: for the authorities to put the resource, the money, and

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Speaker 1: the other resources into it, they can usually track down

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Speaker 1: track down these things unless it involves you know, multiple

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Speaker 1: countries and somebody who was very very skilled. Even even

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Speaker 1: then sometimes it can be done. What did we do

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Speaker 1: before social networking? I remember when I was growing up,

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Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time on the phone. I

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Speaker 1: used to I remember spent hours hours chatting with friends

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Speaker 1: on the phone after school and things like that. But

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Speaker 1: I got involved when I went to u C. L A.

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Speaker 1: I got involved very early in the ARPA network when

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Speaker 1: it was just getting started. So I was starting to

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Speaker 1: send email very very very early on, and chat links

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Speaker 1: and things like that, which are all have equivalence now obviously, Um,

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Speaker 1: what we didn't have were these enormous audiences. Um, you

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Speaker 1: know we were are large. There's a story one of

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Speaker 1: the early mailing lists, uh was with a mailing list

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Speaker 1: called which it was probably was Network Hackers was probably

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Speaker 1: the one that caused the problem. It might have been

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Speaker 1: the wine Tasting list, but one way or another, some

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Speaker 1: of these early lists science fiction things like that. Once

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Speaker 1: they got up to about a hundred recipients, there were

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Speaker 1: there were concerns about over over taxing the resources that

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Speaker 1: were available at some of these sites. Um, a hundred

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Speaker 1: people right, well, now you could have a million followers

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Speaker 1: and you're not even considered to be particularly particularly well

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Speaker 1: established celebrity. Um. We did not anticipate this kind of

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Speaker 1: power going going global and being in everyone's hands, and

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Speaker 1: and and that has been part of the cause of

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Speaker 1: some of the problems that we have find. Sight is

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Speaker 1: always perfect. We we did the best we could, but

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Speaker 1: obviously there are things we'd have done differently if we'd

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Speaker 1: known where we'd be ending up. Now. Listen to more

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one a m.

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Speaker 1: Eastern and go to Coast to Coast AM dot com

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Speaker 1: for more