What is it?Ben: Hey, I bet Chuck Swirsky is just glad all those sirens weren’t singing his name.Ben: I mean, I’m interested. It was weird. Why? Answer Save. The one person whose name was yelled out by the masked people hijacking television broadcasts in Chicago on November 22nd, 1987.Amory: Today, Chuck is the play-by-play radio announcer for the Chicago Bulls. So this was just a few days after the incident occurred, which I originally heard about from news reports. Make the audience look up from their dead end jobs, snap out of their TV-watching zombie state.” You can culture jam.Ben: Editor Alex Pasternack points out that there’s some irony here, in the idea of Max Headroom being part of culture jamming. Coincidentally, the hack and reviewing the tape of the show eventually led me to start watching Doctor Who and I became a big fan.Other than that, we got some other theories, some well defended and thought out, but nothing that survived our scrutiny after a few days at most of looking into. July 21, 2010 1:27AM. But it is possible that the legend of the Max Headroom signal intrusion is more important, and more powerful, without an unmasking. We dig into the story.We want to hear from you! But it’s dirty.”Amory: And that brings us to one of the theories about the hack that has popped up over the years — that it was pulled off by these two brothers, known only to the public as J and K.Ben: This theory was introduced, on Reddit, by a guy named Bowie Poag. You can stop people in the middle of the rat race. Then he comments on hm and calls him (Dan) a “frickin’ nerd” and says something like “this guy thinks he’s better than Chuck Swirsky” or maybe it was “at least this guy’s better than Chuck Swirsky”. Is Chuck Swirsky a freakin' liberal? The "broadcast intrusion" interrupted a primetime news broadcast from Chicago's WGN, and then (more successfully) the 11:00pm broadcast of The hack was made possible by the analog television broadcast technology of the day—the attacker was able to overpower the signals sent by the television studios to a broadcast antenna atop the John Hancock building in Chicago with his or her own signals. There’s not a lot of hard evidence anywhere here, which is why it’s never been solved. It’s also why this story continues to come back to life periodically. So, as an employee of WGN, he wasn’t watching his company’s TV station when, during the nine o’clock news, the broadcast was hijacked.Ben: The person who was taking over the TV broadcast was wearing a Max Headroom mask. Maybe? Starting in 1979, Swirsky hosted a nightly sports radio show on WCFL (AM 1000) where he talked Chicago sports with callers.
He declined to record an interview with us. Point is, this weird, stuttering, virtual newscaster poked fun at newscasters and normies.Amory: And no offense to Chuck or other sportscasters here, Chuck was, and maybe is, a bit of a normie?Ben: Whether or not "Swirsk" understood the point of Max Headroom, his world really was flipped upside down.Amory: Funny to a kid maybe, because the second intrusion got real weird. I was not alive.Amory: You win in the contest of who is older, congratulations.Ben: Thank you very much. And what you need, simply put, is to become a broadcaster yourself.Amory: This is what investigators focused on, too. But to other people, it was a huge deal.Amory: Broadcast intrusions aren’t new. Back in 1987, his job was also in sports.Ben: Chuck says he doesn’t usually take his work home with him. One that, even with its silliness and spanking, was about to get very serious.Ben: FCC spokesperson Phil Bradford went on TV at the time and said this.Amory: The maximum penalty? And behind them there’s a corrugated piece of metal? In the years since, Redditors have played an integral role in getting to the bottom of this case. People used to be able to get Home Box Office for free by putting up a satellite dish. Better than being a freakin' conservative. Not just hackers taking the piss out of the mainstream — more serious issues. I just want to share this material and I believe original broadcast off-the-air recordings are unique artifacts that should be given some exception to normal copyright law. Max Headroom was a little outside of his usual wheelhouse. He also spoofed a Coca-Cola advertising campaign featuring Max Headroom, saying "catch the wave" (Coke's slogan) while holding up a Pepsi can—then crushed the can and tossed it, holding up a middle finger with a rubber extension.After a bizarre homage to the 1959 pseudo-animated television series The end of analog television broadcasting in the US and the conversion to digital signals—as well as the increased use of cryptography to secure wireless data links—has made broadcast intrusions much more difficult, but not impossible. "Yeah I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky. Maybe.Ben: And you’re listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit.Amory: We’re coming to you from WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. And heads up, they’re almost impossible to understand.Amory: People who have studied this video for hours say that the first part of this bit says, among other things, “That does it. Login to reply the answers Post; pearlmar. And then the scene cuts out again and the screen goes black.