I don't think it would be as easy as the "hacker" claims. It's been close to 10 years since I worked in radio, but the EAS system was one area I had responsibility for. There are a number of radio stations that are designated as primary stations, and the alerts would start with them, and no single station can trigger the alert across the country. You might get a signal to propagate across a few states, which, while bad, isn't quite as big of a deal as they make out.
It may seems odd to "hackers" that the system is so simple, lacking encryption, authentication, or human checks and balances, but thats kind of the whole point. If it actually needs to be activated, nobody is going to be around to press the big red button or verify encryption keys. They will all be home evacuating their families.
Anyone else get the feeling that all of this "hacker" stuff in the media is serving to raise the profile of "hackers" and position them as the new "terrorists" in an effort to create an environment of fear that will lead to support for upcoming Internet regulations?
How else would the people watching know that he's a hacker? I mean, he doesn't have a six-monitor setup with a spinning rubik's cube compiling a hydra, he's not wearing 3D goggles, and they didn't have to go past his mom into a basement.
Any code that starts with a long quote from V for Vendetta is not worth my time.
I think anyone thinking about attempting this should read the story about the boy who cried wolf. If anything you reduce trust in the emergency broadcast system. This would be very bad, especially if a genuine emergency shortly followed a B.S. hacker broadcast
I also wonder with #spacepunk tech brewing if it's possible to actually overpower a satellites signal. There is someone on kickstarter working on low earth orbit satellites that would stay in orbit for 2 weeks.
As far as I know, all rockets are heavily regulated by the FAA, including have representatives at launch. I'd be willing to bet that an unauthorized launch wouldn't last very long.
It would have to be a very irritating satellite indeed to justify the expenditure of hundreds of millions and loss of secrecy to those programs involved in shooting down a random satellite.
