The undercover associate producer Michelle Madigan was outed at this year’s DEF CON. Sent by Dateline NBC, she was to uncover the supposedly seedy underworld of the hacker community. Clearly violating the gestalt of the convention and turning down a proper press credential, her intent was to tattle on hackers by acting like one of them. Do the masses think that identity theft, viruses, and unsolicited email swirl stem from the congregation of these hackers? If NBC did indeed catch someone admitting to a hacker crime, is there evidence to back up the claim?
In my mind, if NBC had their way the piece would start off with a sepia toned shot of a kid in a t-shirt and denim (maybe shorts, it is Las Vegas in the Summer). A slow pan starting at the casual shoes up to his face which has a familiar black bar over his eyes, while a voice-over perhaps Michelle Madigan herself, asking if you knew where your personal information is going as it travels over the Internet. What would come next is a distorted voice, owning up to a breach in security, then a freeze frame. A serious voice would tease the story by giving out statistics of identity theft or PC infections, and this would carry the telecast into 22 minutes of hysteria.
Had this story been aired, what would the public have done with this information? Would the people of Kansas (Michelle’s touchstone to middle America) come down to Las Vegas to protest the convention? Personally, I think people would just throw up their hands and say, “I don’t know anything about computers” and move on. As for the kid that was filmed for the piece, he would be ridiculed to no end. Probably shunned, hacked, and farked into Internet super-humiliation.
Undercover NBC Dateline reporter bolts from DEFCON 2007 by ZDNet‘s George Ou — Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony. When DEFCON staff announced the “spot the undercover reporter†game and told the audience that an undercover reporter […]