FBI Steps in to Prevent Super Bowl Porn Repeat
Brian J. Pedersen - The Arizona Daily Star
Feb 09, 2010
Cable television companies make a lot of promises in order to get new customers and keep old ones happy.
How's this for an assurance: no porn during this year's Super Bowl.
A year after a portion of its Tucson-area customer base was greeted with images from a pornographic movie during the late stages of the Arizona Cardinals' loss to Pittsburgh in Super Bowl XLIII, officials with Comcast say they're confident a repeat, ahem, performance won't occur this evening.
"We've strengthened our security systems to make sure any potential problems won't arrive," said Kelle Maslyn, spokeswoman for Comcast's local office. "We feel secure that nothing will happen again."
Customers who happened to be watching Comcast's standard-definition feed of local station KVOA -- which aired the Super Bowl in 2009 -- had their broadcast interrupted twice during the fourth quarter with scenes from an adult movie channel, Club Jenna, that is one of Comcast's pay-per-view channels.
The first interruption showed only a few seconds' worth of a movie's closing credits, but the second break-in involved full frontal male nudity bursting onto the screen just as the Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald scored a fourth-quarter touchdown.
Comcast called the interruption a "malicious act," and after determining it was not done by someone within its company handed over the investigation to the FBI.
"It's out of our hands," Maslyn said.
That investigation is ongoing, said FBI spokesman Manuel Johnson, who declined to go into specifics.
The incident prompted hundreds of phone calls to both Comcast and KVOA, which sent out the original signal of the game. KVOA fed its signal to Cox Communications, which then sent the feed to Comcast through a fiber-optic link, Maslyn said.
This year's game is on KOLD, which is based in Marana and will send its signal to Comcast before Comcast sends it to Cox for distribution to its customers, Maslyn said.
Cox declined to elaborate on efforts it has made to prevent the signal from being hacked on its end and Maslyn admits officials at Comcast will be on high alert while watching tonight's game.
Same goes for officials at KOLD, general manager Jim Arnold said.
Arnold said that while no 100 percent guarantee can be made, he is confident his station is doing everything it can to prevent a repeat of last year and avoid the situation rival KVOA went through.
"I know we have everything in place so that it can't happen from the KOLD control room," Arnold said. "I just really felt for (KVOA) because they did nothing wrong and they felt the brunt of all the activity."
----
Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion
Copyright 2012 by The Arizona Daily Star
