All right, so if we're going to declare our list of all-time hacking all stars,
what makes the top?
War Games.
That's just a movie.
Oh, shoot.
That didn't really happen?
No, it did not.
[the modulated rogue] The Modern Rogue puts on a Max Headroom mask.
In the hall of fame of hacking, I have to assume that the biggest display is for one
incident, the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion.
Yes, people were terrified about it.
Dude, I would be terrified!
I saw the footage and it was like there was something wrong and sideways about it.
I cannot imagine being somebody just watching Doctor Who and all of a sudden somebody took
over a television station, right?
Yes, someone basically hijacking the television signal and showing their own audio or video.
Now I understand this in terms of, like, fm signals.
Like, you could get a pirate radio transmitter and broadcast a pirate radio station,
this case is somebody hijacked I guess what, the carrier signal between a remote thing?
That's exactly what it is.
What broadcast television stations do, is they have their signal, they broadcast it
to a bigger transmitter on top of a high rise building or something like that, and then it goes out
to the surrounding area.
So, someone interrupted that by getting close to the transmitter.
>> Brian: Enough to overpower the original source... >> Jason: Yes.
>> Brian: And have their signal go out.
>> Jason: Yes, and they're not entirely sure how they did it, but it's likely that it was something
the size of a dish tv network thing that was placed really close to the transmitter, and
they just overwrote it for thirty seconds.
One of the remarkable aspects of this, is that there were two intrusions on two different
stations within three hours of each other.
First one happened during the news on WGN, it was a really brief interruption, there
was no audio that was really discernible, but you saw this Max Headroom clad individual.
And then it happened again within three hours during the middle of PBS broadcasting Doctor Who.
The very act of a pirate signal means that an extraordinary amount of effort went into
doing this, including the background, the masks and all that stuff, but it's as though
zero thought went into what he was going to say when he got there!
>> Jason: Yeah.
So it's 1987, you're a kid just chilling out in your parent's basement watching Doctor
Who, when all of a sudden--boom!
[static]
That does it!
He's a freakin' nerd!
He-he-he-he-he!
Yeah, I think i'm better than Chuck Swirsky!
Freakin' Liberal!
Oh Jesus!
When I ...[unintelligible]..ooh.
So when he's talking about Chuck Swirsky, that's a local news anchor, right?
Yeah, there were a lot of Chicago-specific references in the broadcast with the audio.
The voice distortion on here is really unsettling.
So the voice distortion is happening, I assume, partly to mask this person's identity, right?
Sure.
So that's not an artifact of poor pirating, that is just full-on, they're hiding?
It might be a little bit of both at this point, because this was thirty years ago.
>> Max: Ooooh!
It lets me go!
Yeah!
Heh-heh
To emulate the digital background from the
Max Headroom videos, they had to go to the hardware store and buy some stuff and set
it up on a pivot.
Somebody is back there right now!
And that was one of the hunches that they were trying to follow up in order to find
out who did it, because there were only a couple warehouses that could accommodate a
giant eight foot corrugated metal thing, but those didn't pan out.
Do you even know what Clutch Cargo is?
I do, yeah.
What is it?
Okay, so do you remember the scene with Young Butch in Pulp Fiction, where Christopher Walken
comes in and he says, "This is your father's watch" and blah blah blah.
Oh yeah!
I'm pretty sure that's what the little kid was watching.
No kidding.
It was mostly still frames, and they would have people's lips over it, like Annoying
Orange, yeah, I think that's Clutch Cargo.
I think.
Clutch Cargo, with his pals Spinner and Paddlefoot in another exciting adventure, the case of
Ripcord Van Winkle!
[Clutch Cargo theme continues] Oooooow, my piles!
Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece for all the Greatest World Newspaper nerds!
Owwww!
>> Jason: This is kind of terrifying.
>> Brian: A lot of what he's saying seems to be calling out people at the other station WGN, right?
>> Max: That what you get for... re-cy-cled!
Oooh, they're coming to get me!
So at this point we have a scene change, it's very clear this was pre-taped, right?
>> Jason: Yeah.
>> Jason: There's a butt.
>> Brian: That's a butt.
>> Max: Owwww!!!
Now that's the point that you start to run into difficult territory.
I mean, it's one thing to pirate a station, it's another thing to pirate a station and
also not honor the FCC.
>> Max: Ooh, do it!
Owwwww!
[static]
All right, so let's talk about the hunt to find Max Headroom.
Why can't you just know who this person is?
Well immediately they suspected that it was going to be an inside job, but that didn't
pan out at first.
Now you're telling me that maybe they're back to thinking it was?
There was a great Reddit thread where somebody said he thought he knew who the people were,
and actually launched a big investigation and has since come away saying, well from
talking to all the original sources, the people who were actually there working for those
networks, he feels now that it had to be some kind of inside job.
There's too much insider information, there was no out-in-the-wild equipment that would
allow you to hijack a signal like that.
The FCC got involved, the FBI got involved, and yet unfortunately they couldn't get all
of the participation they needed and they were trying to raid various locations throughout
Chicago to follow up on hunches--and none of them panned out.
Well plus, also imagine working at the FBI.
Are you really, is that the hill you're going to die on?
Is I'm going to be the guy who finally figures out who's behind that Max Headroom mask.
Uh, no.
You're going to be like, there's a child murderer that you really aught to be focused on instead
of this guy.
People were terrified, because if these jackasses could hijack a signal, what did the future hold?
Oh sure, yeah.
This could be rampant, but now you've got encrypted signals and so forth and it's a
lot more difficult to do that.
Plus, not a lot of people watch broadcast television anymore.
The question is, though, really what everyone wants to know, if you were going to intrude
on any episode of any television show, what would it be?
I would invade the series finale of Battlestar Galactica and put an ending that made sense!
I would do one of the big battles in Game of Thrones, and then just me off in the treeline
just being like.
You would just!
You would somehow get their signal, just middle of the biggest battle, end of the series,
and just cut to thirty seconds of you drinking and staring at the camera.
Watching really intently, like...