The most chartiable way is to imagine the discussion going like:

"What do you think, Bob, do we need to secure it?"

"Are you crazy? Not like we don't have enough to do to come up with some sort of scheme that we'll have to handshake with when things have been going the way they have been so far. And anyways, any scheme we come up with they'll hate, so if we don't put it in there, maybe they just won't notice."

The other way to think of it is that it went more like:

"What do you think, Bob, do we need to secure it?"

"I dunno. Lets go get some coffee."

In actuality, they probably never thought it would matter.

I mean, its a satellite, right? Who is going to want to hack into that?

Or further, who'd have the tools available?

That's the problem with designing things now that will last into the future. The future is so far away and contains so many hidden variables.

I mean, who'd have thunk you could just get this stuff on eBay one day?

As with much in life, most of it was accidental.

Some of us were down at the former headquarters of our now-defunct former favorite network, auction sale. Just there with the rest of the pinheads, get a few Aeron chairs, get some weird gear with logos.

We'd never have gone down there looking for the binders, our holy bibles, the Rosetta Stones that made all the rest of this possible.

And necessary.

At the time, we just bought them because they were cool. I mean, check out all this neat technical information!

Protocols are, at a weird, geekly level, cool.

"How do we get computer A to talk to computer B? What information will we need to send? What errors could we receive? What sort of messes will we need to get ourselves into?"

The protocols don't get into the why, just the how. The why is like trying to find the face of God in the clouds, determine the grand pattern from the resulting design.

That's when we started to get together.

A few guys with a few manuals and some of their friends. Some of their friends who were all into broadcast. Some guys who were into serious radio design.

Our initial efforts were, of course, disasterous.

We knocked four home shopping channels off the air late one night when we tried to figure out what we were doing.

Some bored technitian down in Atlanta threw us offline with a hard-reboot and we sat back and studied the lessons we had learned.

We thought about it a lot more then. Messageboards filled with content, diagrams, next steps.

We decided to start small. Change a few phone numbers on some of those informercials they show all the time.

Suddenly that screaming guy with the loud tie was shoving calls to an escort service down in Vegas.

Hilarity ensues.

It was a pretty simple affair, pretty crude.

Record the original program. Overlay it with our own crap with some freeware we got off the Internet. Paste it all together.

Send the original signal off to /dev/null while we overlay it with our own.

You'd notice a slight shift in the quality maybe -- we didn't really have the juice then to really bounce the satellite correctly. Things were a bit grainy, but most of those stations were kind of fly-by-night anyway, so who'd notice a little array shifting?

Especially at three AM on a Wednesday.

All about three guys fell off about then. I mean, we'd done it, we made TV.

The guys who wanted to do something hellacious were shouted down, got bored, left. They'd already won anyways as far as they were concerned -- they'd done the hack. On to something else. No Pamela Lee sex tape broadcasts on PBS during kiddie hour.

I mean, we're outlaws, but we've got our standards -- and kids? They have their rights.

It became urban legend then. One of those killer hacks everybody buzzes and nobody believes.

We figured we were screwed for sure, but by then had captured three more birds.

Two days after they had their $186 million satellite up and running we were in.

Some lessons are never quite learned.

By year's end we had all but one of the birds covering North America and three of the newer ones over Europe. They seem to launch these things in waves and not change their design much, so we figure that now that our software is firmly in place we've got a good twenty years of programming ahead of us before the orbits decay, the hardware becomes obsolete, they get knocked out by a piece of floating space junk or otherwise become unmanageable.

Figuring out the right thing to do with it was the hardest part. The code, the hardware design, all that was relatively simple.

We couldn't just start firing off crap, cutting off broadcasts, shutting down transmissions.

That'd draw too much fire. What we needed to do needed to be simpler, quieter.

So nobody'd even know we were there.

The solution came one night when one of us was drunk and railing at the quality of the image on the weather image we were seeing.

"You know, if they didn't have all this crap at the bottom of the display, we'd actually be able to see what the weather was doing."

And that's when we had our plan.

That crawler, that space we all just ignore but broadcasts on nearly every channel in some form or another, information feeding directly into our reptilian brain to be filtered and subprocessed.

That would be our terrain.

It'd be tricky.

Suck the feed, chew the feed, squirt the feed.

There'd be a bit of delay, but we could always have the bird shoot back a diagnostic saying it was getting noise delaying processing.

More code, much of it re-released to the public domain where other kids could do other things with it, make it their own, feed it back to us.

We started by just perking the display down and up. Slowly building up the delay until it became commonplace. Let the engineers try to wrap their heads around it until they decided it was just life and there was nothing they could do about it.

Then we moved.

Changed some figures on the crawl. Make it look like typos.

Once, drunk during the State of The Union we pushed "I feel like a hamburger," apropos nothing at the time.

The Neilsens said we showed that message to 18,000 people that night.

It was so seamless that nobody would have believed it had someone not caught it on tape and posted it to a virally propagating memeboard where it was seen another sixteen million times.

"I feel like a hamburger."

I saw it on a T-Shirt one time under the President's face, just like it had been when we sent it.

Asked the kid where he got it and he said he made it.

He made it.

So perfect.

The guy operating the crawler that night got fired, we heard, and we felt bad about that. I mean, what do you do after that for a job?

We resolved to only use our powers for good from then on.

And that's how its been for the last six months.

Change a fact here to be more correct, refine the bullshit figures they are showing on wars and genocides to reflect true numbers.

Add a tidbit about Black History Month, what have you.

Try to pull this great bullshit nation of ours into something inspiring. Startle stock prices in strange directions, cause weird middle-of-the-night nightmares.

We've plugged into the subconscious of two continents, and nobody even knows we're there.

At times I start awake with screaming paranoia, perhaps not entirely without grounds. We shouldn't be tapping in. If we got caught there'd be hearings, firings, criminal time, overblown allegations.

If we weren't the crawler, though, someone else would be. Someone else would eventually figure it out and find out that old Bob and Chris didn't do their job right. We're at least on the side of good -- in our own minds anyway.

I mean, hey, have you seen the stock prices of...well, no need to get into our political philosophies. The FCC we'll mess with. The FTB, I'd rather not have on my back.

I feel bad for old Chris and Bob. They are guilty of only not having the foresight to believe they were bigger targets than they did. Had they put something bullshit in the way, then I would have had some contempt.

No, these two guys were just working stiffs and the measures we put in to make sure our stuff doesn't get detected or somebody more evil than us comes along and tries to do the same thing.

Maybe somebody will. We lost one of our birds last July and the official word was space debris, but we saw some strange things before that. Weird pings from the midwest.

Maybe just a test van, somebody trying to track down what was going on. Maybe somebody like us, somebody with a few manuals and an eye on the sky.

That frightens me maybe a bit more.