Broadcast Interruptions

I just finished watching a documentary that got me thinking, and I've always believed that if a documentary doesn't do that then it has failed in it's purpose so this one was of course a success. It was about an incident that occurred in Chicago in 1987 when two bizarre broadcast interruptions occurred on the night of November 22nd. The first was a failure since the station that was covering a recent large sports event was able to quickly regain control of their channel, leaving the image on screen for only a few seconds, but the hijackers succeeded with their second attempt. The resulting visual and audio that was shown throughout the city was disturbing to say the least. It featured a man in a mask resembling a popular television figure at the time known as "Max Headroom", and for around 90 seconds, the man chose to use his time by laughing psychotically and making some references to popular culture and the local WGN station before shutting off the transmission of his own apparent free will. Most likely just like all of the Chicagoans who witnessed the unsettling tampering, I was left with many questions. The first and most prominent of which was "why?" The documentary detailed how the act would have required quite a bit of planning and effort on the part of the perpetrators to infiltrate a major broadcasting network, and for them to go to all of that trouble just to project this strange presentation was baffling at first. Then I thought about it a bit more, and I realized that while the transmission didn't appear to have a coherent message or angle, the act in and of itself said a lot more. We have such faith in the security of the world we live in. We like the monotony of daily life because there is stability in it, and when all aspects of our lives, such as what we see, what we hear, and what comes across the many screens we've become so familiar with are what we expect, the idea of normalcy is upheld. We like to think that the world is a moderately safe place that is free of chaos and uncertainty for the most part, but this is just a perception. It's a perception that this particular act of broadcast hijacking shattered. In the documentary, the possible motives were discussed but nothing was ever confirmed. Some have suspected that it was an elaborate prank, some think it was an act of image sabotage by a disgruntled former WGN employee, while others thought it was some sort of bizarre marketing ploy. My personal thought is that the motivation was very simple; to show that it can be done, to highlight the fact that technology isn't as secure as many like to think it is. The perpetrators were never found, and the message they sent, while unsettling, seemed to have no underlying sinister backstory. The documentary also mentioned other instances of broadcast hijacking and mention of the act as a trope portrayed in media. I've seen things like that happen in movies and television shows, and I don't recall any instance where the intent behind the act wasn't to convey some sort of ominous or sinister message to the masses, thus making the idea of something like that happening in the real world cause me to immediately assume that there was some dark backstory behind it, but that wasn't the case here. It just seemed to be strangeness for the sake of strangeness. Still, it showed everyone that it's not just something that happens in movies, that it can be done, and that if someone really wanted to use the tactic for some sort of malicious reason it could definitely be done. That's what made it most unnerving. It brought the possibility into reality, and the idea that the technology that we have become so dependent on can be subverted with the right knowledge and means is existentially disconcerting. Yes technology has gotten much more sophisticated since the 80s, but with that, one would assume that the same type of techniques used to subvert it would have also grown. Yet I've never heard of anything like that happening in my lifetime, at least not as of yet, but the point that the incident highlighted is that sometimes things aren't as secure as we think they are, essentially making anything possible. It was a fantastic documentary, especially considering it was made by a student, that highlighted the flaws of the security theatre that we've become so accustomed to, which is a very important thing to keep in the back of your mind. Uncertainty is unsettling, but it's an unavoidable part of life, and the better prepared we are for it, the better off we'll be.