> As I opened my wallet, I considered whether I should risk using this fake ID on the Secret Service. It probably amounted to a real crime. I had my driver's license as well. But you only live once and only a few of us even get a chance like this once in our lives. So I handed him the fake ID. He noted and returned it. The Secret Service took an ID that said "Laser Safety Officer" with a photo of myself wearing an eyepatch.
Woz plays life like an RPG.
I'm not a lawyer, I have no idea how criminal law in the USA works, but why would this be a crime? He didn't fake a Department of Defence ID, he created an ID for a fictional Department of Defiance, it may look similar, it may appear as a "real" ID because it's not just a piece of paper, but it's about as real an ID as a gym membership card.
(Also, falsely claiming a relationship with the military is downright dishonerable.)
Under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, it's a felony crime to: make a “false statement” to an agent of the > federal government related to a federal matter.
...
A “false statement” can be:
a material omission.
a material misrepresentation, or.
using a fraudulent document.
The US has streamlined this relative to other countries. You don't have to commit a crime, you just irritate a LEO and they find the crime for you.
I find his nonchalant delivery quite jarring. I don't understand what's going through his head here.
People are frothing to frame this story with 2023 glasses and, to me, this reaction makes it all the more clear how today’s culture is so corrosive. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s not about privilege of rich white men. Maybe it’s about the rigid conformism that the tech industry has imbued in its people in this past decade. The screams of people glued to Anki preparing for leetcode interviews, not understanding why someone would dare challenge the status quo. Regardless, it’s a sign of the times.
But after thinking about it more -- and I'm in my mid-40s -- I think what it also reminds us of is that law enforcement actually used to be a lot more reasonable -- to be clear, this may probably only apply to white people who appear as if they are not poor. But I think maybe the police (whether local or national security) have actually maybe gotten a lot more intense in the past 30 years. Possibly actually more intense for everyone.
The risks of "messing with" security personel, at least for middle-class-appearing white guys, was very definitely a lot less back then.
Woz was not in custody and is therefore exaggerating about being Mirandized. He played a prank by giving his clown employee ID. It was in Casinoland where people had goofy job titles and this wouldn't have been so crazy. Nothing to see here.
That said, if he had been in actual trouble or has been committing forgery, the clown ID would have been a bad move.
Defiance
I love the story.
I think “novelty ID” may be more correct. Just like those novelty dollar bills that kind of look like real currency in some ways but still have significant distinctions.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/steve-jo...
Steve Jobs met his biological father accidentally at a restaurant.
He got an obvious fake from a blond 6'2" guy. He gave it to our dark-haired 5'7" friend with a very different facial structure and told him to try it at several other bars in the area. Said friend got into every bar.
Risky, but it doesn't sound like a forged government ID (driver's license, etc). It might have even had his actual name on it.
https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/?&p...
Basically he tells story in a way that average person assume he’s printing fake bills, when in reality he’s just cutting and binding sets of uncut bills into a notepad.
Lying to a federal investigator though is a federal crime and one that’s frequently resulted in prison sentences.
Worth noting that Jobs & Woz first product was actually a device to make illegal free calls:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/10/steve-jobs-f...
Not to mention that it is not a good look for a secret service agent to not know the details of the actual currency he is tasked to protect (e.g. available in perforated sheets). I suppose it is possible the agent got called in not knowing the specific details warranting arrest*, but that would be even worse.
* Am I right to think that Woz was arrested given that he was read his Miranda rights?
https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-pr...
That wouldn't be problem. Them problem is that it causes visits from the Secret Service. Happened to two of my friends - and only two friends that I know of having sheets of bills.
They seem to be primarily made as collectibles or silly gifts, I'd expect that most people who have them would not spend them.
They simply thought that so long as they found it amusing, the harm others experienced physically, emotionally, or materially, were not really of consequence. After all, surely if they were in their targets shoes, they would have thicker skin. And that definitely isn't a lie they're telling themselves and others.
I for one wish there were more real people around, living life for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like we were intended to live.
“Haha, yes yes, Woz - You’re very funny. Got me again.”
All of this said, I haven't seen a critical analysis of Peterson's theory, which from what I can tell, does not connect the dots, so to speak, from biological behavior to individual intentions. Still, I think it is fair to say that individual intentions are not required for Peterson's explanation. The human brain does much that is neither conscious nor intentional in the usual senses of the words.
This theory is really interesting to explore and extrapolate. I'll give an example. Let's say someone treats you with a normal level of politeness. You could argue that they are not messing with you, and not challenging your position in any dominance hierarchy. But perhaps this shows they feel confident enough to address you as a peer. Or perhaps they feel like they are in a higher position, and have no need to flaunt it. In any case, your subsequent response will provide a lot of data for the other person.
I think of the number of times that people humble brag. Or the subtle things people do to demonstrate knowledge. The more I think about it, the more I think Peterson's theory is useful in an explanatory sense.
To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with any moral philosophy that suggests such behavior is ideal from an ethical perspective.
When the element of comedy hinges on hero being privileged it doesn’t mean it’s not funny, but it does prompt a thought experiment as to whether a world where there’s no such profiling and everyone is treated equal base trust is possible, and if so whether such a story could be funny in that world. Taking high-trust societies I can think of as examples, I suspect either total surveillance or high value placed on following protocols sincerely with the goal of not creating awkwardness would be implied, in which case probably not.
I’m 30-something white guy, I can easily imagine not feeling comfortable trying that stupid joke if I was anyone else.
``Because the individual notes on uncut currency sheets are legal tender, they may be cut apart and spent.''
If I received one, I'd also be suspicious.
Been a tradition ever since and our reputation as fans who “travel well” helped ensure bowl game preferences for years.
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/sports/college/clemso...
Framing one as a picture would seem to invite a burglary, and as a source of individual notes it’s much cheaper to go to a bank.
Edit: Not intended as a critical question, btw - I was just wondering how you’d use them.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-mnuchin-money...
Use them to tip like Steve Wozniak? :D
An ordinary civilian might fall down that hole never to come out again. Just showing a fake ID to a fed could be met with serious retribution.
https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/139493
Legends
One oft-repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows: Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to “phreak” his call around the world. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England. Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. He sometimes repeated this stunt at parties. Draper also claimed that he and a friend once placed a direct call to the White House during the Nixon administration, and after giving the operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus", and asking to speak to the president about a national emergency, they were connected with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper’s friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles, at which point the person on the other end of the line angrily asked them how they'd managed to get connected to him.[8] Draper was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.[2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32723420
DonHopkins 4 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: How MetroCard works (2005) [pdf]
Then there was the time the infamous phone phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper got busted for forging BART Cards... Steve Wozniak and his son also got mistakenly busted and thrown in a holding cell for 4 hours because he had a (real) BART card that didn't work, so he got pissed off and ended up paying for Draper's attorney fees, and Draper copped to a misdemeanor of altering MUNI tickets, and went on probation for a year, but did not lose his job at Autodesk.
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/just_tacky
>TECHNOLOGY. March 1, 1987. JUST TACKY! By CBR Staff Writer.
>Aw c’mon John, forging the electronic characteristics of BART tickets is just tacky! John Draper, who inter alia wrote the Easy Writer word processing package, has been caught with $2,500 of forged access tickets to the San Francisco Bay-Area Rapid Transit subway system, and fellah, BART, which has never fully recovered from the teething troubles in the early days when trains used to whistle through stations at 60mph with the doors wide open, can’t afford it; Draper’s real claim to fame is that he discovered in the 1960s that a toy whistle given away in packets of a glutinous and bilious-coloured sugared corn puff cereal called Cap’n Crunch was pitched just right to mimic the tones AT&T used to set up long-distance calls, so that packs of the sickly Cap’n sold out as kids rushed to claim the whistles that enabled them to call auntie in Montana or Mary in Maine; that was ingenious if wicked, but forging BART tickets – tacky, John, tacky.
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
>DigiBarn Radio: John Draper @ Autodesk (1985)
>Listen to John Draper talking about his Autodesk period, the BART card fiasco and more! (8MB MP3, recorded May 2006)
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06...
>John Draper at the Digibarn's Homebrew@30 event
>Thanks Tom Barbalet for recording this rare interview with John Draper (aka "Captain Crunch" or "Crunchman" these days) about his life at Autodesk, and the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cards fiasco. Also included here are other life and times of "Crunch".
https://digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-...
Partial transcript (listen to the whole thing for the full story about the BART card fiasco -- I'm just transcribing the part about Woz getting arrested here):
[...]
John Draper: So Woz game me a Mac I could use, and Woz also go me a ... Cause Woz got hassled by the BART cops too.
Here's what happened, here's what happened at that point.
Woz went to go see the Oakland A's game. And what he wanted to do, he had his son with him. So his son I think at the time was about 9 years old. And he wanted to take his son to the Oakland A's game.
And his son says "Hey, daddy, can I ride BART?" Sure, why not? So he goes to Hayward BART, er, he goes to Hay- not Hayward, yeah, he goes to Hayward BART, yeah, parks the car, and rides BART to the Oakland Coliseum. Ok.
So what happened was, his son's BART card didn't work. He put it in to the turnstile, and it got rejected coming back. And Woz goes over to the BART attendant and says "Well my card doesn't work", he says "look, it comes back, it came back and said rejected or something."
And the guy, the BART attendant says "Wait right here." He gets on the phone, calls the BART cop. BART cop takes Woz and his son down to the Lake Merit Station, ok. At which time they grilled Woz about what he'd, that he'd, and they were claiming, accusing him of tampering with the cards, and they threw Woz and his son in a holding cell for like six hours.
Tom Barbalet: So let me get this straight.
John Draper: Until they could get an expert to come in and take a look at that card, to make sure that the card had not been tampered.
Tom Barbalet: And the card was a regular card that they just bought.
John Draper: Yeah, just a regular card that they just bought.
Tom Barbalet: So they knew your connection with him?
John Draper: No they did not know my connection with him.
Tom Barbalet: So how did, why was he...
John Draper: His card didn't work. They suspected that he had tampered with the card.
Tom Barbalet: But surely that would have happened to, just in a sample size, a hundred, maybe two hundred people in the Bay Area.
John Draper: I don't know the details, all I know is they arrested him and his son, and they held them up in a, put him in a holding cell for four hours, until they can wake up a, get the BART engineer to get out and examine the card, and once they figured out it was their fault, they let him go.
Tom Barbalet: Right.
John Draper: So when Woz found about the BART fiasco that I did, thing, that I got roped into, Woz says, "I got this attorney, I'll pay for, I'll pay for your legal attorney fees. Go see this guy. So I went and say this guy, this attorney. So he was handling my case in the BART thing.
[...]
Dangerous game to play, imagine trying to convince a judge that "I was not intentionally looking for trouble".
> When he said that they don't make bills like this I asked "They don't?" as though I thought it was quite normal to have sheets. My answer was also so emotionless as to confuse him about me, and to make me seem even more evasive. This, again, I do for a comedic effect.
Is it just me, or does the man simply not understand what comedy is?
I enjoy a good joke as much as the next guy. That said, if you are routinely paying for items at the register by cutting bills off of a sheet with scissors and handing the police a fake ID when asked for identification, you’re basically asking for trouble. And you’re almost certainly going to waste a lot of people’s valuable time.
Generally speaking, I do really like Woz as a person. But in this particular instance, he does kind of come across as a big pain in the ass.
And that was a very odd story… he is an edgy guy.
I don't know if I'd say "edgy", so much as a hacker — and there have been hackers in all generations, eg https://books.google.ch/books?id=V3ByEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA575&lpg=P...
If I'm not mistaken, one tip I've heard is that one can transfer more than that in gifts yearly, and although that requires filing a gift tax return with the IRS, it doesn't mean necessarily mean paying any tax. There's a lifetime maximum that has to be hit, and it's extremely high. (I'm not a lawyer nor an accountant, and this is not legal or tax advice, yada yada)
So if Woz had given $10,001, then he would have had to file it, and then when he died, it would have added $10,001 towards his total lifetime gift tax exclusion from his estate (currently $13M). But if he gave $10k (or whatever yearly reporting maximum) per year until he dies, then all of that does not get counted towards the $13M lifetime gift tax exclusion, so in a way, it is an additional tax reduction when the estate gets passed down.
"Extremely high" is relative (some 11 million, probably less at that time?), considering the person telling this story.
Woz and Jobs got their first big break from selling physical copies of the 'Blue Box', a device which allowed you to place long-distance phone calls through intelligently breaking AT&T's phone routing network. In today's 'wire fraud' day and age, this 100% would have been illegal -- so note that these two people made today's most valuable company!
Relatively speaking, printing a photo ID or $2 bills is nothing. It is the hacker spirit (notice we are on a site called hacker news!).
A few years ago I had the privilege of meeting the woz after an event at which he was a speaker.
I was surprised at how humble and patient he was with people vying for his attention, many asking for him to autograph laptops and whatever else they had at hand.
I got his attention when I asked him about tetris and we geeked out a bit over it. Thats a story for another day but I did walk away from that conversation with a prized souvenir -- an autographed $2 bill: https://imgur.com/gallery/TQo0KOi
... and a laser cut steel business card :)
I can see the playful side of it, but people and places where pranks are not generally well received would be federal agents and casinos - so from the ‘victims’ point of view I expect they could have done without the bother.
When you are a retired billionaire, you have freedom to explore.
See also Penn Jillete's airport "security" protest, though he wasn't retired or a billionaire , but was willing to spend his time/money/privilege fighting for our rights.
There was a man in Italy nicknamed il Professore who was notorious for producing them in bulk while not being particularly conspicuous about it.
According to an anecdote from one of his family members when a cashier tried to confirm whether the 20€ banknote he gave her was legitimate he said "lady, it costs me 18€ to make one of these, so I don't even bother".
How times have changed.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120127020131/http://archive.wo...
It wasn't always like this, even just 5 years ago. I don't know where all the weirdos came from but they've fundamentally changed this site, and not in a good way.
I asked for a lot of £5 (smallest denomination note in UK) at the bank once because I was going to a music festival (before mobile card payment was routine). They asked me casually why I wanted them and I explained. Seems to be a Know Your Customer thing.
Although who knows if that's the whole reason?
It's also the case that criminals prefer cash, and a large number of small denomination notes could be used to facilitate a large number of small value crimes more easily.
Drug dealing is the obvious one, but there are others. I witnessed a shoplifters being stopped by a security guard once, with £200 worth of goods in their coat (booze, steaks), and they offered a £5 note - "it's all I have" - and by making that offer of payment, they reduced the crime and the penalty somewhat to the point the manager and security officer removed the goods, asked them to leave and told them they weren't welcome any more - no police involved. For all that bank knew, you were running a gang of shoplifters doing this.
The banks often have the $2 notes, but you have to ask explicitly.
No, don't try to tell me how the secret service agent and the casino employees were victims and how this somehow ties into white privilege or some crap like that. Try spending some time off the internet and return to real life.
Probably not hugged to death, since their server is unstable for quite awhile.
Outside of one rare occurrence where I received change in golden dollars and $2 bills, the only time I've seen $2 bills was when my father would buy them to tip with.
I hate this attitude so much.
BTW the basic facts might be true but the details reek of bullshit.
Oh, look, that was so funny putting myself into a situation that most people would be scared shitless to be in and might not have ended well for them! Let's just waste everyone's time so they can humor me on a joke! I am such an edgy rich white guy! A real hacker!
What an absolute tool.
