Posted on 05/06/2006 5:11:23 PM PDT by Flavius
In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks.
He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology.
America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars.
Banned from using the internet, Gary spoke to Click presenter Spencer Kelly to tell his side of the story, ahead of his extradition hearing on Wednesday, 10 May. You can read what he had to say here.
Spencer Kelly: Here's your list of charges: you hacked into the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and Nasa, amongst other things. Why?
Gary McKinnon: I was in search of suppressed technology, laughingly referred to as UFO technology. I think it's the biggest kept secret in the world because of its comic value, but it's a very important thing.
Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.
SK: How did you go about trying to find the stuff you were looking for in Nasa, in the Department of Defense?
GM: Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes.
SK: So you're saying that you found computers which had a high-ranking status, administrator status, which hadn't had their passwords set - they were still set to default?
GM: Yes, precisely.
SK: Were you the only hacker to make it past the slightly lower-than-expected lines of defence?
GM: Yes, exactly, there were no lines of defence. There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers. You could run a command when you were on the machine that showed connections from all over the world, check the IP address to see if it was another military base or whatever, and it wasn't.
The General Accounting Office in America has again published another damning report saying that federal security is very, very poor.
SK: Over what kind of period were you hacking into these computers? Was it a one-time only, or for the course of a week?
UFO? A bird or a plane?... Gary was not able to get a picture of what he saw GM: Oh no, it was a couple of years.
SK: And you went unnoticed for a couple of years?
GM: Oh yes. I used to be careful about the hours.
SK: So you would log on in the middle of the night, say?
GM: Yes, I'd always be juggling different time zones. Doing it at night time there's hopefully not many people around. But there was one occasion when a network engineer saw me and actually questioned me and we actually talked to each other via WordPad, which was very, very strange.
SK: So what did he say? And what did you say?
GM: He said "What are you doing?" which was a bit shocking. I told him I was from Military Computer Security, which he fully believed.
SK: Did you find what you were looking for?
GM: Yes.
SK: Tell us about it.
GM: There was a group called the Disclosure Project. They published a book which had 400 expert witnesses ranging from civilian air traffic controllers, through military radar operators, right up to the chaps who were responsible for whether or not to launch nuclear missiles.
They are some very credible, relied upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there's anti-gravity, there's free energy, and it's extra-terrestrial in origin, and we've captured spacecraft and reverse-engineered it.
SK: What did you find inside Nasa?
GM: One of these people was a Nasa photographic expert, and she said that in building eight of Johnson Space Centre they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. What she said was there was there: there were folders called "filtered" and "unfiltered", "processed" and "raw", something like that.
I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.
But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.
It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up.
This thing was hanging in space, the earth's hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing.
SK: Is it possible this is an artist's impression?
GM: I don't know... For me, it was more than a coincidence. This woman has said: "This is what happens, in this building, in this space centre". I went into that building, that space centre, and saw exactly that.
SK: Do you have a copy of this? It came down to your machine.
GM: No, the graphical remote viewer works frame by frame. It's a Java application, so there's nothing to save on your hard drive, or at least if it is, only one frame at a time.
SK: So did you get the one frame?
GM: No.
SK: What happened?
GM: Once I was cut off, my picture just disappeared.
SK: You were actually cut off the time you were downloading the picture?
GM: Yes, I saw the guy's hand move across.
SK: You acknowledge that what you did was against the law, it was wrong, don't you?
GM: Unauthorised access is against the law and it is wrong.
SK: What do you think is a suitable punishment for someone who did what you did?
GM: Firstly, because of what I was looking for, I think I was morally correct. Even though I regret it now, I think the free energy technology should be publicly available.
I want to be tried in my own country, under the Computer Misuse Act, and I want evidence brought forward, or at least want the Americans to have to provide evidence in order to extradite me, because I know there is no evidence of damage.
Nasa told Click that it does not discuss computer security issues or legal matters. It denied it would ever manipulate images in order to deceive and said it had a policy of open and full disclosure, adding it had no direct evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
Something different (sort of) to listen to on Coast to Coast during the sleepless nights ahead...
This is soooooooo STUPID. If the government wants to secure documents, why do they connect thier machines to the internet? The government has its own network.
loose lips make you see spaceships
I think they let this guy see what he wanted to see.
That's clearly a weather balloon...
UFO ping.
Of course!!!
This guy is an obvious loon. Sticking him in prison for 60 years is like beating a sick dog with a sledge hammer, just gratuitous cruelty. the people who need to spend some time in the slammer are the clowns who were in charge of computer security.
Comedy is very valuable and rare in the Universe... hence all the Government secrecy.
Between viruses and other BS I estimate that in the last 5 years it has cost my little organization about $10,000 US dollars in man-hours, software, and repairs just to deal with this dreck.
If I ever met a hacker in person I would be hard pressed not to beat him to death with my bare hands.
Between viruses and other BS I estimate that in the last 5 years it has cost my little organization about $10,000 US dollars in man-hours, software, and repairs just to deal with this dreck.
If I ever met a hacker in person I would be hard pressed not to beat him to death with my bare hands.
$50,000 where I work in one instance thanks to things like abetterinternet and other infections that allowed an endless stream of still more downloads from like minded sites. It only took ONE moron for it to get loose on the LAN.. Some of our CNC machines were Windows Based.
So.
Let ME help you.
I bet, properly done, I could keep him alive for days in searing, excruciating agony, until at the last minute, (Rest of APALLING description deleted).
They are one step below a spammer..not a BIG step, but...
He will plead insanity and likely get off.
Then watch him as he spends the rest of his life making money preaching to the conspirazoid choir and making guest appearances on Coast-to-Coast.
This guy's crime is the moral equivalent of trespassing. He went where he knew he wasn't supposed to go, where it knew it was illegal for him to go.
In mitigation, he didn't "break and enter," since there were no "locks" on the virtual doors (blank passwords.) And he did no damage, as far as anyone can tell. So perhaps "60 years" is far too severe a punishment. Nevertheless, by his own admission, he's guilty.
My disgust with the Fed Gov in general and the DOJ in particular knows no bounds.
Love my Country. Fear my Government.
. . . on it's way back to Mars piloted by this guy:
Well, I don't know which is upside down, so just take your pick. I think the top one looks more like the run-of-mill 'grey.'
Thanks, Flavius.
Dave, for the ping list?
I've wondered how far this hacker got. Should be interesting to see how far the court thing is allowed to go.
And Art went off the deep end this year.
I still check out the program schedule. Kevin Mitnick, speaking of hackers? He didn't appeal to me as a guest,
so I'm not going to tune in with him as a host.
I doubt very much the UK is going to hand this guy over. They don't hand over serial killers. Not that the US handed
over IRA terrorists (thanks to the Kennedys' et al).
Probably use the "psychiatric care" excuse.
There are far too many reports from a wide diversity of sources including many high quality sources about there being 3-4 DIFFERENT essentially free energy technologies kept under warps for decades. I think there's far too much smoke on that score for there to be 0.000% fire.
What and when something will come to light and actually reach consumers is clearly unknnown by mere mortals.
The issue reportedly is that the puppet masters have always insisted on centeralized control and distribution of power, energy for social and political control reasons.
Certainly logical. And, also, something the global government will be doing more and more in worse and worse ways. Just imagine Shrillery's attitude, goals and mentality multiplied a few times over, at least.
Even Bush's Dad is a Johnny come lately though he clearly knew tons in his CIA job. I don't trust Sr any more than I trust a Klintoon.
I have some hope that Jr is authentically Christian to a significant percent, at least, and is doing his patriotic best to at least slow down the advance of the NWO. I hope it's not a vain hope. Time will tell.
In any case, there's no one better on the horizon to support on the other side of the DIMRATS who would certainly speed us toward the global tyrannical government at the speed of light with Shrillery gleefully ranting every moment of the way.
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