Wired.com: Rupert Murdoch Firm Goes on Trial for Alleged Tech Sabotage
Did a Rupert Murdoch company go too far and hire hackers to sabotage rivals and gain the top spot in the global pay-TV war? This is the question a jury will be facing in a spectacular five-year-old civil lawsuit that is finally being tried this month in California but which has, oddly, received little notice from U.S. media.
The story detailed here sounds like a really bad mashup of Tomorrow Never Dies and a couple of Robert Ludlum novels. I am surprised the media hasn’t jumped all over this.
… agents in Texas seized suspicious packages containing CD and DVD players stuffed with more than $40,000 in cash. Parcels similar to this were being sent almost daily from Canada, via Texas, to a hacker in California named Christopher Tarnovsky … In addition to Tarnovsky, the company also hired Oliver Kommerling, a hacker known for writing the primer on cracking smartcards. Kommerling has acknowledged that he helped NDS set up a research lab in Haifa, Israel … NDS also hired a handful of other people with colorful pasts who they say had a role in hacking and pirating EchoStar/NagraStar. There was Reuven Hazak, who had been deputy head of Israel’s Shin Bet during the notorious Bus 300 incident … NDS also hired a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer named John Norris and a former Scotland Yard commander named Ray Adams. Finally, it hired a former would-be terrorist, Yossi Tsuria, who became chief technical officer of its lab in Israel. Tsuria was part of a radical group of Jewish Israelis in the 1980s that plotted to bomb the Dome of the Rock … a German hacker in Berlin known as Boris Floricic, aka Tron, disappeared while walking home from his parents’ home one day.
Texas, Russians, Israelis, American military, Scotland Yard, a German hacker and Rupert Murdoch! All that is needed is a hot prosecutor, who will later be played by Nicole Kidman, to throw the book at Murdoch & Co. (the happy ending) and we’ve got a blockbuster on our hands! Justice is served … on a DVD!
Who needs fiction?!