"On April 27th, a video pirate calling himself Captain Midnight startled cable TV viewers in two-thirds of the country by interrupting a home box office movie with the printed message, Good evening, HBO, from Captain Midnight, $12.95 a month, no way. Showtime, movie channel, beware. This is apparently the opening volley in a war against the growing practice of scrambling pay TV signals to deny that his home satellite dish owners the opportunity to tune in for free, a move that Captain Midnight calls extortion and white-collar crime. This afternoon on midday, he's been dubbed Captain Midnight and he joins us. Nice to have you here. That's the moniker, Jim. That's the moniker. Right. Nice to have you here. Ken, can you tell us where you are? Yeah, I'm back east somewhere. I'm rather harried. It's been a hectic flight. I almost feel like David Jansen in The Fugitive, an old TV series where he was constantly on the run. Are you on the lam? Oh, absolutely. I've got about 400 agents now searching for me in all 50 states, but we've spent two years setting up our scenario, flying engineering people from NASA who were dumped when they had to cut back modern knowledge and equipment that they've revamped, far exceeds anything that the government, like this conversation is being relayed through six different locations. It's almost like a Max Sennett comedy, because when you think all these government-paid agents out looking for me, and when there are real criminals out there, and Abu Abbas, the notorious international criminal who actually killed, hurting anyone, had a sanctuary in Algeria on an exclusive NBC broadcast, and not even the CIA knew, and they were the last to know. I mean, it's awful to think that all the time the money is being spent to find me so they can set an example, a bad boy, you interrupted our programming, and we don't like it, so you're going to get into the slammer for a couple years, and it's going to cost a lot. I just hit the half-century mark. I've been in television, cable, radio for 30 years, and I've seen the erosion of the quality of programming over the years. I've seen the... Is that what this is intended to be, a protest against the quality of programming? Yes, part and parcel with that, but let's start now with the scrambling devices. Well, let's... Cable services are just asking to be paid for their product. What's wrong with that? How is it exposure? Fine, but let's have some quality. Let's pay the price, but let's have something commensurate with that fee we're paying every month. Subscribe to HBO and Showtime, they're separate entities, but they share the same programming. They pay their retread movies back and forth. If you see Chainsaw Massacre Part 13 on HBO, you're going to see it on Showtime, and you're going to see it 10 times a month on each channel."