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McHoax
Monday, June 11 2001
The press was obsessed all day with the Timothy McVeigh execution non-story. Even the highest-minded of NPR reporters were milking what little gore and morbid entertainment value they could fromn the shriveled teats of witness accounts. But exactly as the government had intended, there was no drama to this story. McVeigh went out like a mutt at the dog pound. Even staring into his eyes at the moment of death (as a roomful of vengeful victims' relatives had done) gave no satisfactory indication of suffering.
I was kicking myself all day that I hadn't prepared a hoax videotape of the execution beforehand, something that I could release onto the web as a supposed hacker-intercepted closed-circuit television transmission. But now that I knew the details of the way the execution had been filmed, it seemed like a fairly easy thing to fake.
After I came home from work, John and I walked to the local coffee shop and read magazines and talked about various issues of the day. The McVeigh execution came up and, after a little lazy reluctance on my part, we decided to go to the effort of actually making a hoax McVeigh execution video. So we hurried back to the house and set up the living room as a makeshift studio. We'd decided that John should play McVeigh, since John's hair is kind of short like McVeigh's and neither of us look anything like the guy otherwise. Though the actual execution had been filmed from above the execution table, I thought it would be easier if we filmed our hoax horizontally, with John fixed against a yoga mat stapled to blank white section of wall. Lacking a tripod, I set up my video camera on top of a low table. We tried to match all the details in the witness accounts as much as possible, though some things we had to make up, such as the voice-over and the distant echoing voice of the prison warden. (I did both of these voices, using my redneck authority figure voice for the latter.) We even used yellow paint to make John's lips look pale and dead after the "execution" was carried out, though no such small visual details turned out in the video.
After we were done shooting the video, I had the tricky task of capturing it from my camera. I'd never successfully captured any digital video from my camera using my firewire cable, but due to the nature of my setup these days, I was going to have to do it that way. I ended up installing my firewire card in the downstairs computer, which is a PII 350 running Windows ME. Surprisingly, the built-in Windows video editing software worked rather well, with a welcome lack of meaningless user interface distraction. The speed of the machine was too slow to create anything except low-grade video, but this served my purposes well; I had plans of claiming that the video had been captured using improvised interfaces by ingenious midwestern hackers.
Once I had the video in a file on the hard drive, it was short work to type up the copy and get it all out there on the web. After I had the web page up and the video embedded, I posted links in all the usual places: the CNN messageboards, ThreeWayAction, Vodkatea, etc. When John came home, he posted the link in a high-traffic VW Golf messageboard, even staying nominally on-topic:
Oh my god! I was in my Golf driving today and heard on the radio (not the Monsoon unit, just a GL), that some team in Missouri cracked the McVeigh DSL broadcast and posted it on some untouchable website...check it out...it looks real!
www.spies.com/gus/mcveigh
Throughout the late evening, John and I sat around chuckling about our good work and the traffic we could see flowing in. Sometime in the middle of the night a Dutch language newspaper linked to the page, suggesting that our clearly-fabricated video might be the real thing. The author of the article also wrote to me asking if it was legitimate, but, not wanting to spoil anything, I never bothered getting back to him.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010611 feedback
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