BlogTalkRadio broadcasts repeatedly compromised
BTC - Waking Up Orwell, BeatTheChip.org's regular weekly radio news magazine, was pre-empted Thursday by an aggressive online hack. This is the 3rd compromise while airing on BlogTalkRadio.com in the program's history.
The hack hampered the airing of an interview with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FOIA counsel, Lee Tien who explained their findings about FBI instrusions on social networks like Facebook and BlogTalkRadio.com. The hack was described as successive browser crashing to upload media to the show's media ports, account episode deletions and disparity between the front end display of the episode and back end capability to view, acknowledge or operate the engineering ports of the show's episode.
"We sincerely apologize to regular listeners who expected to hear the scheduled programming. Unfortunately, we cannot reconcile the repeated attempts to hack our accounts with BlogTalkRadio.com and are actively seeking a new radio home for our weekly program. I did all I could do today to air the program," says Sheila Dean, host, producer and engineer for the dystopian news program.
What audience members witnessed at airtime was an episode scheduled late at 11AM CST featuring the EFF speaker. What the host-engineer, Sheila Dean, saw was a prompt "There are no shows that can be scheduled 3/25/10". Dean published technical difficulties using Twitter up until the 11 AM showtime. She dialed into the BlogTalkRadio host mainframe using the caller code and later spoke for over 30 minutes. The broadcast was never heard. Operating browsers from her MacNotebook crashed repeatedly, interfering uploads of the pre-recorded media.
Dean first noticed problems with excessively slow access to her account. She restarted her computer and logged back into her user account. She then discovered her scheduled episode was deleted. BlogTalkRadio, in a reply to service the account said that only a person with access to the account could have deleted the program and that "it could not be done from our end." The episode was submitted to BlogTalkRadio's PR department for promotion Tuesday.
In an EFFort to continue to air the radio program, Waking Up Orwell was immediately rescheduled to air at 11AM CST. Soon to follow Dean experienced interruptions and disparities consisting of successive browser crashes minutes before airtime while logged into her account.Dean switched to another PC right before airtime. She logged into BlogTalkRadio.com's online account to produce program as scheduled. The Internet Explorer browser then repeatedly rerouted to another newscast featuring Tom DeLay on BlogTalkRadio.com, refusing her account access.
"This was by far, the most obvious outside attempt to maliciously pre-empt us in the program's history. Based on where our program was rerouted it appears politically motivated by those entertained by neo-conservative talk," said Dean, producer of WakingUpOrwell.
WakingUpOrwell, often features controversial news specific to privacy and promotes involvement of citizens in affairs which directly affect American civil liberty. Dean's broadcasts feature staunch criticisms of current government policies governing citizens rights and national security. While she was disappointed in her inability to air the program, she is optimistic about funding for a new online and terrestrial home for her popularizing program.
BlogTalkRadio.com's technical staff claim no culpability in the hacking attempts from their end.
