Max Headroom: TV pirate

A story that I caught over on BoingBoing has me fascinated. The basic low down is that one night in November of 1987, a couple of TV stations in the Chicago area were hijacked of their signals. This means that someone had the right knowledge and equipment to pull off this amazing stunt. For a brief period of time, people were treated to a guy in a Max Headroom[wiki] mask with a moving background and garbled audio.

You can see the event transpire on WTTW[wiki] as it actually aired during an episode of Doctor Who[wiki] via this YouTube link. I know that if I would have caught this in 1987, when I was nine, I would have been creeped out. Below is a CBS news report detailing the event[wiki].

The fine for a prank like this from the FCC isn’t cheap, and the “masked man” was never found. Getting onto WGN[wiki] is what really blows my mind. Even though that attempt didn’t last very long, you’d have to be close by to get it to work. However, you think someone would notice a bunch of people hauling large pieces of broadcasting equipment around. Also, you can see in both of these video examples that there was at least another person who helped pull this off. Curious that after nearly twenty years, the secret has remained safe.

The BoingBoing post goes on to point to other links that further the background of this story, and I’ll post them here as well because they are nothing short of incredible pieces of underground history. Damn Interesting has an article about the event itself, especially a closer look at the audio from the signal hijack of WTTW. Signaltonoise offers further background on the incident involving Captain Midnight’s hijacking of HBO in the year prior[wiki], which the CBS report mentions above.

I instantly sent this to my former chief engineer at WSUI because he eats up this stuff just like I do. Jim has some experience dealing with the realm of TV as well as radio, and we both worked in tandem with a bunch of TV guys. Of course, he still does.

“This would be much tougher now a days. With the digital links in place the pirate would have to shell out bigger dollars for the digital modulator. Sometimes hackers do find a way to edge into this stuff on the cheap. I kind of remember the hubbub of the day.”
– Jim

As much as TV is changing to a more IP delivered system, you know that this will inspire someone to try something just as daunting. They go to great lengths to keep those systems closed, but nothing is ever secure enough to someone who really wants to stir something up. Just look at what happened during an airing of a press conference with Dick Cheney on CNN in November of 2005. A producer exercised their feelings about him by slapping a big “X” graphic on his face during the live feed, and CNN dropped the producer when it was discovered to not be an accident or technical error.

The human will is a marvelous thing, and this is the most incredible element in all of this. Fines and security won’t stop someone who really wants to stir things up. I would bet that this got a lot harder to do, especially after 1987.