WASHINGTON – Once upon a time back in the 1980s, a hacker took over a digital message board on the campus of a major American university, on which he then proceeded to display a variety of profane, inappropriate, disgusting and, in some cases, quite funny messages.

I’ve looked up the incident (which I personally witnessed) on the web for the purposes of linking to a description more detailed than I can offer, but to no avail. It appears the event has been lost to pre-internet history.

At any rate, if the same thing were to take place these days, my hunch is the college message board hacker wouldn’t bother coming up with original content of his own designed to dismay those associated with officially operating the board; he’d just lazily display porn thereon and call it a day.

I’ll leave the complaining and hand-wringing over the recent display of Pornhub on Union Station monitors to others; what bothers me about it is the hacker’s utter lack of originality.

In recent years, whether due to intentional hacks or mere mishaps, porn has been displayed on digital roadside billboards, bus stop ads and other public mediums all over the world.

But this is America, dammit, and we’re supposed to lead the world, not follow it — especially where porn is concerned.

To me, if you’re going to hack something just to display porn on it in this country, you need to aim a whole lot higher than train station monitors or highway billboards. And don’t even talk to me about rumored porn-hacks that get me all interested but later turn out to be bullshit.

Sure, we once had a porn clip show up during a Super Bowl broadcast, but only in local markets and just for a few seconds — not exactly something to write home about. Plus, the perpetrator turned out to be a former employee of the cable company, which means it wasn’t so much a hack as an inside job. At least the Super Bowl porn hacker chose a worthy target in the biggest of big games, though, rather than settling for the relatively low-hanging fruit (or maybe that should be low-dangling fruit?) of Union Station monitors.

The crown jewel for a modern porn hacker, I should think, would be Donald Trump’s twitter account.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling for or advocating someone hacking Trump’s account to post clips from F*ck Trump thereon. I’m just saying if someone did so, it would be deeply, fundamentally awesome.

I’m also definitely not saying it would be great for someone to project the full text of Trump’s infamous pussy-grabbing comment on the side of one of his hotels, as Robin Bell did with his “emoluments welcome” message the other day.

(OK, so I am saying it would be great for someone to do this exact thing, but not in a way that constitutes real, actionable “encouragement” or “inspiration” to do so, because that might upset my attorney, to whom I already owe more money than I ever intend to pay.)

By the same token, I’m absolutely in no way encouraging porn-hackers to target the website of a certain Fox News pundit to replace its main page with a ‘Goatse’ image, even though I think the image would be far more representative of the pundit’s personality than the current home page.

Nope, I’m not doing any of those things. I’m just saying if you’re going to engage in porn-hacking anyway, please put some thought, creativity and originality into the effort.

After all, as the old saying goes, anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Image © CJStumpf.