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Jim Barthold
With a Clint Eastwood role in the wings, Dan Backo elected, instead, to be Inspector Gadget.
Backo was a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to President Clinton, when he heard of an opening at the NCTA for someone to run the Office of Cable Signal Theft. It was a job, Backo said, that fit right into both his demeanor and his background, so he took it.
"It was a great opportunity. It was a mix of some interesting things, a great love of technology," he said.
He'd been exposed to the underbelly of technology in a previous Secret Service post with the frauds operations section. That interest stayed when he moved to the White House, which had its own technology intrigues, such as the never-ending attempts to crack the Web page.
"Every day there were folks who tried to hack into the White House Web page," Backo said with disgust. "I didn't do too much of that. There were other agencies that handled a lot of that, but the Secret Service liaison worked with those agencies and the White House directly to handle those problems."
Backo's job was to guard the president.
"It was an incredibly demanding job, and to be honest the travel schedule was pretty involved," he recalled, noting it got tiresome fast. "In the years I spent over in the electronics crime section, and some of the neat things I was exposed to at the White House, I just developed a really great love of technology."
Besides, even if the mob is into cable theft, Backo shouldn't have to throw his body in front of NCTA executives.
"There are a lot more interesting players with the folks that are involved in piracy, just because it's so lucrative," Backo emphasized. "It's a great way to make a lot of money and, unfortunately, a lot of the folks who are involved in it now are using the funds or the monetary gain that they make in cable piracy to make a jump into other businesses."
Recently, Wilmington, Del. police, the FBI and Suburban Cable busted a trio of alleged Russian Mafia members selling illegal descramblers in the McDonald's parking lot. The units, about the size of 3x5 index cards, were not the normal "black boxes" associated with signal theft.
"Everything I've seen are the larger boxes," he admitted. "I haven't been exposed to anything that size."
Backo said he hadn't yet seen the evidence - $20,000 worth of these devices that the alleged pirates brought from Brooklyn in a Lexus trunk - but that cable theft overall is morphing to include a variety of devices in a variety of venues.
"It's unfortunate, but a lot of these folks are also involved in other businesses that include software piracy, satellite network card piracy and also pornography," he explained. "The Internet has exploded also. There's a lot of these Internet sites and the sale of black boxes."
In the Wilmington case, Suburban officials picked up their first clues from an Internet site advertising the devices. Everyone in the cable security industry is aware of the dozens, perhaps hundreds of Internet sites dedicated to cable theft. Some receive unsolicited e-mails telling them about the opportunities.
"The cases are becoming more complex and the players are more involved," Backo said. "We have a lot of great things to steal, too."
Thus far, he said, cable modem hardware has been exempt, but Internet fraud, both in selling illegal descramblers and high-speed scams is high on his list of things to watch.
Then there's telephony. The telephone companies have become old hands at defeating, or at least nullifying, service theft. As cable enters that business, it, too, will need to learn the tricks of the trade.
The Secret Service taught Backo the value of inter-agency cooperation.
"The Secret Service has a lot of jurisdiction and we kind of ran the gamut of interesting cases from credit card fraud to financial institutions fraud, moving into telecommunications cases, cellular telephone-related work," he said.
Backo interacted with such agencies as the FBI, Postal Inspector and Customs Service in battling fraud.
"That's one of the things I focus on here, too the cooperation between the industry and law enforcement and other interested parties. One of my main ideas is the networking aspect and education and the sharing of information," he continued.
The FBI, he said, is doing its part to educate federal, state and local law enforcement agencies on cable-related crimes.
"We established really good liaison relationships with FBI headquarters electronics crime section," he said.
The FBI, in fact, is building a West Virginia-based Internet fraud control center, to handle and assign piracy cases.
"I speak with their director over there pretty much on a weekly basis," he noted.
Backo was set to address a week-long FBI Internet conference in Quantico, Va. as a further education step.
Additionally, he said the FBI has revamped its security guide, the Training and Enforcement Handbook, with updated color photos of the latest known devices.
"We provide these handbooks to law enforcement and lot of our member companies," he said.
Thanks to digital cameras, members can also take pictures of the latest devices they find and send them via e-mail for future editions of the guide.
Backo and his colleagues also help with court cases.
Even so, Backo said, the effort requires more education.
"There are a lot of great resources and talent out there in our industry that I call on to assist me with a lot of these concerns," he said.
A well-timed, customer-initiated consumer bust, he conceded, also helps the cause.
"The cable subscriber should be very concerned about this. Most customers pay their bill every month honestly and it's (theft) something they should be concerned about," he pointed out.
At the end of the day, though, the cable industry bears the burden for the continuing theft problem. Nobody, after all, wants to steal something that's not valuable. And, no matter how complex the technology becomes, there will always be someone up to the challenge of getting something for nothing.
"There are a lot of creative folks out there," Backo said. "I wish we could work to tap that energy and focus it in a positive manner."
Like being Inspector Gadget rather than Clint Eastwood.
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