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.
I wouldn't want to try to prove in a court of law that humans are typically and inherently and on average
logical.
When it comes to bureaucrats and especially a collection of bureaucrats . . . logical, IQ and sanity seem to decrease geometrically.
Thanks much, buddy.
As a shrink, I don't find any evidence of insanity in what he wrote . . . or even in what he did.
Irresponsible to a degree in several aspects but not totally.
Careless and perhaps self destructive in terms of his risk taking but not abnormally so given this era and his generation.
Rebellious more than slightly but that's at least average these days.
He had something of a Robin Hood mentality. Given all the givens, that's even pretty understandable.
I agree that the complicit errors on the gov side are serious. But I'd prefer to see the senior puppet masters tried for treason than the troops on the front lines.
But that won't happen. They will run the world for a limited time . . .
and then God will make an object lesson of them. Thankfully. But the suffering and blood letting in between will make the inability for seniors et al to pay for fuel look like a relative non-issue.
I feel that way about spammers and spyware creators and somewhat toward hackers.
He should have just gone to the National Archives and stuffed the evidence in his pants. From what I understand, stealing real secret documents is a misdemeanor. At least that was good enough for Sandy the Burglar. This poor bastard didn't get anything and is facing 60 years.
My disgust with the Fed Gov in general and the DOJ in particular knows no bounds.
Love my Country. Fear my Government.
- - -
I strongly . . . agree with you.
The Bergler thing was a hideous and brazen abuse of puppet master power. And even citizens hearing sufficient facts mostly yawned. God have mercy. That old business about citizens deserving the government they get cuts too close to home too often.
I think the death of Art's wife clearly threw him for a loop--understandably given the quality of their relationship--at least the closeness.
But, I think Noorey (sp?) does a tolerable job and besides, the guests are interesting at least half the time.
I haven't quite figured out why the puppet masters tolerate it unless it's to avoid confirming too much by obviously doing the show in. And, they probably get plenty of their disinformation out by that route, too.
Muleteam1
Unfortunately the media has made the word "hacker" into a bad word. Origionally, in the beginning of the computer days, a Hacker was one who knew his code and hardware/software well and could crunch code like nobodys business; much like what we call a Guru today perhaps. Nowadays, thanks to the media, the work hacker has a negative meaning. Anyway, now we have black hat, white hat and gray hat hackers to differentiate, but the media has soiled what used to be a rather honorary "good work ethic" type of word.
God seems to enjoy lots of paradoxes, contrasts . . .
Perhaps the best of His creation has to have meaningful personal touch with the worst in itself in order to be trained and conditioned with sufficient empathy to rule and reign with Christ WELL over endless galaxies and ages and civilizations.
Any relation to Steve Dallas?
Humans are curious and contradictory critters.
Government bureaucracies are even more so.
The government has succeeded amazingly well at keeping a number of secrets. But, yeah, there's been lots of leaks on the UFO info stuff. But between the successful ridicule effort and the many successful disinformation efforts leading to ridicule, it hasn't mattered much, so far.
Cruel and unusual punishment ping.
I think there's far too much smoke on that score for there to be 0.000% fire.
The operative word is "essentially" free.
But if, for wild example, someone came out with a power soure that involved workable small scale sustained fusion, or capture and conversion of matter by dumping it into neutronium, etc..etc then whoever controlled such a system would control the World's economy.
It would seem that a country like the FSU, that was having such a high-tech flea market for so many years, would not be able to restrain themselves.
Human nature would not change all that much, no matter how the technology changed.
Imagine what would happen. The entire mideast would collapse within a year into neanderthal barbarity.(Oh, well, THAT was not a good example)
The economic upheaval would be unprecedented and entire industries would disappear overnight. So I agree there is inertia, and there are good human nature reasons for supression.
Consider "Cold Fusion". We still do not know what is going on, except that chemical or electrochemical reactions simple do not produce 10 KeV neutrons, nor do they produce transmuted elements such as helium isotopes from deuterium.
For all the millions spent, such as the Japanese programs in recent years, there does seem to be a shortage of conclusions.
Teller was on our Board, and in a meeting some years ago, we had a chance to ask him what he thought. It was more or less a shrug, and THAT is not like him at all.
"There is SOMETHING going on, but it may not be fusion...but then again, I am not a very good Physical Chemist because my best known reaction involved only one element..."
But he was very Establishment Connected, so who knows?
Thanks.
That was AMAZINGLY WELL PUT. MUCH APPRECIATED.
I think yours is the best knowledgeable response I've had on that issue in . . . more than 30 years.
I do think that the transition could be made a lot EASIER and a lot MORE SUCCESSFULLY with far less destructiveness
than
the transition WILL BE made to the tyrannical global government with far MORE heavy handed bureaucratic control over individual lives . . . and particularly over masses of deaths.
It has been clear to me since the beginning and increasingly with every report that cold fusion could be one viable source of energy depending on a few factors seemingly relatively unknown. It's been clear that it's been held back and folks' lives have been mangled by the controllers.
What's not been clear, to me, is how MUCH energy would be available in the best designed process/systems. Nevertheless, it has appeared to be a productive, workable, worthwhile amount--especially from a projected more mature process/system.
I think Teller has been a co-opted 'good ole boy' for a long time. I see him somewhat as I see Stanton Friedman.
I see Friedman as a very sharp, witty, no nonsense curmudgeonly elderly professor/scientist type who's been connected enough with the controllers to know something of that score. And, to know something of the technologies involved in UFO/ET sorts of goings on.
I don't know if he's a boundary worker or controller stooge in the UFO camp but the latter doesn't seem to fit his personality type. He seems, to me, to be either having some fun at such conferences--earning some added coins with his books etc. and perhaps metering out bits of information over a long period.
Or else, he's trying to insure that there's some rational sanity toward solid disclosure and increased broad based citizen understanding of a field he knows to be serious in it's projected implications for the human race.
It's conceivable he's keeping tabs on the field for the controllers but I still don't think that suits his personality. I doubt he'd do it.
But the pics he showed at the recent Aztec conference of the atomic/nuclear engines he had helped developed and their small size vs power output--the pics and specs were fascinating. If that's what he was allowed to disclose, what must be still under dark wraps must be really incredible--and that's not even getting into the ET/UFO originated stuff, as far as I could tell.
KevinDavis,
pinging the list per quix's requset.
OPI (Of Possible Interest?)
In the late '70's, someone gave me several old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the early 50's (that I believe I still have in a box somewhere in the house).
In one of the magazines is a full page ad that General Electric bought, advertising for;
I'll try and find the magazine, and post a photo of the ad if anyone is interested, (when I have some free time).
Interesting.
The power he was talking about getting out of an engine 3 feet in diameter was incredible. I forget exactly but something on the order of that generated by a huge dam.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.