When former Vice President Dick Cheney had a defibrillator implanted in his chest, he feared what would later become an infamous Homeland plot line—that someone could wirelessly tamper with his defibrillator remotely.
“When we put that in originally in ‘01, then we got a new model in about ‘07, and that newer model was capable of being programed remotely, wirelessly,” Cheney said. “We removed that feature out the concern that if I was working a rope line someplace or in a crowd, that somebody could in fact tamper with that and cause a heart attack, so we disabled that feature.”
In season two of the hit TV show "Homeland," the vice president is assassinated by terrorists who remotely log into the president’s implanted defibrillator and cause a heart attack that kills him.
“Some years later on Homeland they actually had an episode where did just that, killed the vice president who had an implantable defibrillator,” Cheney said on Monday’s Morning Joe.
Cheney joined the panel to discuss his 35-year battle with heart disease. His new book, “Heart” is out in hardcover.