Hackers Lay Off Death Video

Anyone else remember this? Took place in June of 2001. Makes me feel old.

After a four-minute glitch preparing the video link between Indiana and Oklahoma, the families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing viewed an encrypted signal of Timothy McVeigh’s execution Monday morning. The FBI said it had no reports of attempts to pirate the signal. As of Monday afternoon, hacker groups and several online militia websites were silent on the execution.

Officials from the Justice Department, the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons have been secretive about how they would ensure the videoconference was secure. And several computer security experts have said it would not be out of the question for a hacker to splice into the video feed and decrypt the signal.

“If you hack it and store that feed, you don’t have to do it right away. You could do it in a week, a month, a year, or 10 years. In 10 years, who knows what the force of the attacks might be,” said Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor. “It would be difficult, but not impossible.”

McVeigh was convicted of the April 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that left 168 people dead, including 19 children. He was put to death by lethal injection. At 8:02 a.m. EDT Monday, the relatives in Oklahoma City could not see the gurney where McVeigh would be put to death.

“Having a little trouble with the video, just like I said, OK?” an official said. By 8:06 a.m., the audio and video connections worked. McVeigh was pronounced dead at 8:14. The experts were less concerned about signal-splicing than someone sneaking a camera or digital camcorder into either the Terre Haute, Ind., or Oklahoma City viewing areas.

“The real point at which you’re going to corrupt the system is by getting somebody at the reception point,” Rasch said.

Jim Cross, a spokesman at the Indiana prison where McVeigh was executed, said all the witnesses from McVeigh’s lawyers to media representatives were searched prior to entering the viewing rooms. The spokesman for the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, where relatives of the victims watched, could not be reached for comment. Observers there said they were told that cellular phones and purses were not allowed in the building, and some of them — but not all — were checked with a handheld metal detector.

If the execution was recorded, either by a hacker, witness, or prison worker, it might show up in the news media. In May, the Supreme Court decided that the First Amendment permitted a radio host to play an illegally taped phone call, since the host did not actually intercept the call.

Rasch said if that decision was applied to the McVeigh execution, it could allow a television network or almost anyone else to broadcast McVeigh’s death.

“In the Internet age, what is a news outlet and who is a journalist? If I’m a hacker and I put it out on the Web and I didn’t steal it, why am I not entitled to the same protections?” Rasch asked. “In all likelihood, I would be.”

Some execution photographs have become public. In 1928, a New York newspaper photographer used a miniature camera to photograph a woman as she was being executed in the electric chair. The photo was on the cover of the New York Daily News the next day and is still preserved on the Internet.