The Dirty Digger strikes again

A satellite TV hacker has testified in court that he was paid for 10 years by HarperCollins, a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The hacker’s job, according to the prosecution, was to break DISH network’s cryptographic security and flood the market with pirate DISH satellite cards. The idea was that this would cost DISH nearly a billion dollars in lost revenue, perhaps putting them out of business or weakening them ready for a takeover.

That, in turn, would have left DirecTV–part owned by Murdoch –with a monopoly on satellite TV in the US, just like Murdoch’s Sky has a monopoly in the UK.