Comcast Cable is turning the investigation of the now-infamous Super Bowl porn interruption over to the FBI. Its own investigation found no technical mistakes on its end, no runs, no drips, no errors. The cabler is convinced somebody hacked in.
But who has the skill and equipment to pull it off? Very few. "Captain Midnight," the video pirate who jammed HBO's signal in 1986, turned out to be John R. MacDougall, a Florida electronic engineer. He used his on-the-job tools as an uplink technician to briefly knock the network off the air.
I won't speculate who has the necessary parts to jam a cable system. But technically, it's not hard. I remember when TCI (now Time-Warner Cable) in Columbia, Missouri, brought its production truck over to televise a conference at the MU School of Journalism. The production folks plugged into the cable system and used an empty channel to transmit raw live coverage back to the head-end, where it was put on another channel for cablecast. If you know what you're doing, you can adapt the technology for nefarious purposes.
Bringing the feds into the case is a necessity, because cable TV systems are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. However, don't expect hard time for the culprit. Captain Midnight ended up paying only a $5,000 fine on top of probation after a plea bargain -- and his stunt affected cable subscribers across the country.
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