From the Eye of a Legal Storm, Murdoch's Satellite-TV Hacker Tells All

SAN DIEGO -- Christopher Tarnovsky feels vindicated. The software engineer and former satellite-TV pirate has been on the hot seat for five years, accused of helping his former employer, a Rupert Murdoch company, sabotage a rival to gain the top spot in the global pay-TV wars.

But two weeks ago a jury in the civil lawsuit against that employer, NDS Group, largely cleared the company -- and by extension Tarnovsky -- of piracy, finding NDS guilty of only a single incident of stealing satellite signals, for which Dish was awarded $1,500 in damages.

"I knew this was going to come," Tarnovsky says. "They didn't have any proof or evidence."

The trial was years in the making, yet raised more questions than it answered. It came down to testimony between admitted pirates on both sides who accused each other of lying. Now that it's over Tarnovsky, who was fired by NDS last year, is eager to tell his side of the story.

Dressed in loose jeans, flip-flops and a T-shirt, Tarnovsky, 37, spoke with Wired.com by phone and in an air-conditioned lab in Southern California where he's been running a consultancy since losing his job. Surrounded by boxes of smart cards and thousands of dollars worth of microscopes and computers used for researching chips, he talked excitedly at lightning speed about his strange journey, which began in a top-secret Pentagon communications center, and ended with him working both sides of a heated electronic war over pay TV.

His story sheds new light on the murky, morally ambiguous world of international satellite pirates and those who do battle with them.

The stakes are high: Earnings in the satellite-TV industry reach the billions. In the first quarter of this year alone, U.S. market leader DirecTV announced revenue of $4.6 billion from more than 17 million U.S. subscribers. Dish Network earned $2.8 billion from nearly 14 million subscribers. Although satellite piracy has greatly diminished from its peak seven to 10 years ago when the events detailed in the civil lawsuit took place, the two companies lost millions in potential revenue, and spent millions more to replace insecure smart cards used in their systems and track down dealers selling pirated smart cards.