On April 27, 1986, under the pseudonym “Captain Midnight,” American electrical engineer and business owner John R. MacDougall jammed the Home Box Office (HBO) satellite signal on Galaxy 1 during a viewing of the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. The four and a half minute message was broadcast to the eastern half of the United States in protest to HBO’s rates for satellite dish owners, which MacDougall considered overly expensive. MacDougall was working as an operations engineer at the Central Florida Teleport uplink station in Ocala, Florida, and wrestled control of the transmission from technicians at an HBO communications center in Hauppauge, New York.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the jamming, identifying the transmitters and stations equipped with the specific character generator used during the broadcast signal intrusion. MacDougall soon surrendered to authorities.

Under a plea agreement with the prosecutor, he was given a $5,000 fine, one-year unsupervised probation, and a one-year suspension of his amateur radio license. The jamming received much attention in the U.S., with one executive calling the intrusion an act of “video terrorism.” As a consequence of the incident, the United States Congress passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (18 U.S.C. 1367), making satellite hijacking a felony. The Automatic Transmitter Identification System was also developed soon after.

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